Modality effect

Biological Parallel

Owls hunting in darkness remember the last sounds heard better than last sights—auditory memory persists 3-4 seconds versus visual's 0.5 seconds because sound arrives temporally (predator moving left-to-right) while vision is spatial (predator is there). Spoken instructions at meeting ends stick better than visual slides because your auditory buffer holds recent information longer. This is sensory architecture: different prediction problems demanded different memory persistence.