I Research Notes Interactive Auditory and Visual Images in Persons Who Are Totally Blind Carla Tinti, Dario Galati, Maria Gratia Vecchio, Rossana De Beni, and Cesare Cornoldi Mental imagery can be a powerful aid for human memory. In particular, memory is enhanced by the creation of an interactive image: a single complex image that includes two or more items linked together. For example, to remember the words whale and cigar, a person can produce an image of a whale with a cigar in its mouth (Paivio, Clark, & Khan, 1988; Paivio, Walsh, & Bons, 1994). Some studies (see, for example, Jonides, Kahan, & Rozin, 1975) have found that a similar strategy improves the memory of people who are blind. That is, people who are blind can use images that have the essential characteristics of visual objects, such as properties of shape and location in space. The images do not con- tain typical attributes unique to visual objects, such as color or brightness (Carpenter & Eisenberg, 1978; De Beni & Cornoldi, 1988), but they seem to contain characteristics of objects that could be processed to enhance memory. Auditory imagery plays an important role in memory processes, and Tinti, Cornoldi, and Marschark (1997) demon- strated that interactive auditory imagery, like interactive visual imagery, enhances learning. In their experiments, sighted sub- jects were asked to learn a list of paired- associate words using an interactive auditory image formed by the sounds repre- sented by the words given. However, no research has ever studied the possibility offered by this auditory strategy to people who are blind, who can sometimes have difficulty with the corresponding visual strategy. In the experiment presented here, the subjects were asked to create interactive images, and the strategies they used in the visual and auditory tasks were compared using different groups of items: single, pairs, and triplets. This procedure allowed the authors to test the hypothesis that the two modalities (visual and auditory) can be partially independent at both the sensory and representational levels and that persons who are blind perform well when the audi- tory modality is involved but not when the visual modality is required. The results could help researchers under- stand the origin of the difficulty that people who are blind have in creating interactive visual images (De Beni & Cornoldi, 1985, 1988). If the problem is related to the com- plexity of the stimuli, the results for an auditory or visual task should be similar, but if the problem is related to the type of modality, the auditory task should lead to a different level of performance than the visual one. METHOD Subjects Of the 30 subjects in the study, 15 were congenitally totally blind from birth or age 2 and 15 were sighted. The blind subjects (5 women and 10 men), with a mean age of 37.6 years, who were contacted through the Italian Association for the Blind, volun- teered to participate. Their blindness was due to retinitis pigmentosa (4 cases), con- genital glaucoma (9 cases), or blennor- rhagical conjunctivitis (2 cases). ©1999 AFB, All Rights Reserved Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness, September 1999 579