Figure 1

Schematic illustration of the trial design and behavioural results. (a) In each trial, participants were simultaneously presented with two consecutive natural visual objects and two sinusoidal sounds delayed by an interval of 3 s. The task was to judge whether probe and sample stimuli were the same or different. In one condition, participants were required to only memorise the visual object and to ignore the auditory one (V_only). In the other two conditions, both stimuli had to be remembered and compared to the sample stimuli in the respective modality, with one condition consisting of an easy version of the auditory WM task (strong pitch difference; VA_easy), the other consisting of a difficult version (small pitch difference; VA_diff). (b) Accuracies for the visual WM task in the three conditions. No differences in accuracies were found between the conditions. Error bars represent standard errors of the mean (SEM). (c) Accuracies for the auditory task. As expected, participants performed better in the easy auditory task compared to the difficult version. Error bars represent SEM.