No abstract

The results have applicability for auditory displays in the vehicle interface, whereas the theoretical framework is of value in auditory display design in a broader context.

Forgetting over the short-term has challenged researchers for more than a century, largely because of difficulty in controlling what goes on within the memory retention interval. But the Òrecent negative probesÓ procedure offers a valuable paradigm, by examining influences of (presumably) unattended memoranda from prior trials. Here we used a recent probes task to investigate forgetting for visual non-verbal short-term memory. Target stimuli (2 visually presented abstract shapes) on a trial were followed after a retention interval by a probe, and participants indicated whether the probe matched one of the target items. Proactive interference, and hence memory for old trial probes, was observed whereby participants were slowed in rejecting a nonmatching probe on the present trial that nevertheless matched a target item on the previous trial (a recent negative probe). The attraction of the paradigm is that, by uncovering proactive influences of past trial probe stimuli, it is argued that active maintenance in memory of those probes is unlikely. In two experiments we recorded such proactive interference of prior trial items over a range of interstimulus (ISI) and intertrial (ITI) intervals (between 1 and 6 seconds respectively). Consistent with a proposed t w o -process memory conception (the active-passive memory model or APM), actively maintained memories on current trials decayed but passively Òmaintained,Ó or unattended, visual memories of stimuli on past trials did not.(abstract 221 words)

Across studies, IIV measures were consistently associated with falls in older persons and demonstrated some potential in relation to gait. IIV metrics may, therefore, have considerable potential in clinical contexts and supplement existing test batteries in the assessment of falls risk and gait impairment in older populations.

In the 1st reported experiment, we demonstrate that auditory memory is robust over extended retention intervals (RIs) when listeners compare the timbre of complex tones, even when active or verbal rehearsal is difficult or impossible. Thus, our tones have an abstract timbre that resists verbal labeling, they differ across trials so that no "standard" comparison stimulus is built up, and the spectral change to be discriminated is very slight and therefore does not shift stimuli across verbal categories. Nonetheless, performance in this nonverbal immediate memory task was better at short (1-, 2-, or 4-s) than long (8-, 16-, or 32-s) RIs, an outcome predicted by temporal distinctiveness theory whereby at long RIs, tones are closer in time to tones on previous trials. We reject this account in the 2nd experiment, where we demonstrate that the ratio of RI to intertrial interval makes absolutely no difference to performance. We suggest that steady forgetting is consistent with a psychoacoustically derived conception of an auditory memory (the timbre memory model) that embodies time-based forgetting in the absence of feature-specific interference.