Auditory memory distortion for spoken prose.

Abstract

Observers often remember a scene as containing information that was not presented but that would have likely been located just beyond the observed boundaries of the scene. This effect is called boundary extension (BE; e.g., Intraub & Richardson, 1989). Previous studies have observed BE in memory for visual and haptic stimuli, and the present experiments examined whether BE occurred in memory for auditory stimuli (prose, music). Experiments 1 and 2 varied the amount of auditory content to be remembered. BE was not observed, but when auditory targets contained more content, boundary restriction (BR) occurred. Experiment 3 presented auditory stimuli with less content and BR also occurred. In Experiment 4, white noise was added to stimuli with less content to equalize the durations of auditory stimuli, and BR still occurred. Experiments 5 and 6 presented trained stories and popular music, and BR still occurred. This latter finding ruled out the hypothesis that the lack of BE in Experiments 1–4 reflected a lack of familiarity with the stimuli. Overall, memory for auditory content exhibited BR rather than BE, and this pattern was stronger if auditory stimuli contained more content. Implications for the understanding of general perceptual processing and directions for future research are discussed.

Boundaries Extend and Contract in Scene Memory Depending on Image Properties

“…In some other studies, boundary contraction has been observed, but not focused on; for example, Chadwick and colleagues [11] reported a significant proportion of trials showed boundary extension, but close to 15% also displayed boundary contraction. Otherwise, boundary restriction has only been reported in memory for emotional images [30,31] and auditory stimuli [32]. The current study is the first work to show boundary contraction is as immediate, automatic, and widespread as boundary extension.…”

La perception multisource : une nouvelle approche de la perception de scènes

“…La généralisation du phénomène à d'autres modalités sensorielles semble par ailleurs témoigner de l'importance du processus d'extension sur le plan fonctionnel. Si les tentatives de généralisation à la modalité auditive se sont à ce jour révélées peu fructueuses (Hutchison et al, 2012), le BE a toutefois été mis en exergue dans le domaine du toucher (Intraub, 2004), représentations visuelle et haptique reposant sur une représentation spatiale commune (Intraub, Morelli, & Gagnier, 2015). Cette dernière observation se révèle fondamentale sur le plan théorique, car suggérant que la perception de scènes serait avant tout un acte de cognition spatiale.…”

Anticipatory memory for regular and random patterns.

“…5Hutchison et al (2012) reported “boundary restriction” for auditory prose or segments of music. Rather than remembering additional linguistic information or musical content, participants remembered less.…”