Percepts, not acoustic properties, are the units of auditory short-term memory.

Abstract

For decades, researchers have sought to understand the organizing principles of auditory and visual short-term memory (STM). Previous work in audition has suggested that there are independent memory stores for different sound features, but the nature of the representations retained within these stores is currently unclear. Do they retain perceptual features, or do they instead retain representations of the sound's specific acoustic properties? In the present study we addressed this question by measuring listeners' abilities to keep one of three acoustic properties (interaural time difference [ITD], interaural level difference [ILD], or frequency) in memory when the target sound was followed by interfering sounds that varied randomly in one of the same properties. Critically, ITD and ILD evoked the same percept (spatial location), despite being acoustically different and having different physiological correlates, whereas frequency evoked a different percept (pitch). The results showed that listeners found it difficult to remember the percept of spatial location when the interfering tones varied either in ITD or ILD, but not when they varied in frequency. The study demonstrates that percepts are the units of auditory STM, and provides testable predictions for future neuroscientific work on both auditory and visual STM.

Effects of talker continuity and speech rate on auditory working memory

“…In particular, when speech tokens are encountered close in time, talker continuity in speech can give rise to the perception of a continuous auditory stream (Best et al, 2008;Bressler et al, 2014). The advantage of auditory streaming for speech perception is that an entire stream is processed as a single perceptual object (Joseph, Kumar, Husain, & Griffiths, 2015;Macken, Tremblay, Houghton, N i Cunningham, 2012;Mathias & Kriegstein, 2014;Shinn-Cunningham, 2008;Sussman et al, 2007). Within psychoacoustics, it is well accepted that the sequence order of items within one stream are stored as part of the identity of the single auditory object (Bizley & Cohen, 2013;Griffiths & Warren, 2004); however, if streaming breaks down and tokens are perceived to be, and stored in memory as, distinct streams, it becomes difficult to judge the temporal order of the items (Bregman & Campbell, 1971;Vliegen, Moore, & Oxenham, 1999).…”

Musical and verbal short‐term memory: insights from neurodevelopmental and neurological disorders

“…15 Perceptual properties (e.g., perceived sound location) and not acoustic features of the sounds (e.g., interaural time or level differences) appear to be stored in STM. 20 It is worth noting that this relative independence of the memory traces for various auditory features does not preclude a storage of auditory objects as an entity in memory. 21…”

“…For example, pitch memory traces are degraded when the interfering tones have fundamental frequencies close to that of the to‐be‐remembered tone, and timbre memory traces are degraded by interfering tones of similar timbres . Perceptual properties (e.g., perceived sound location) and not acoustic features of the sounds (e.g., interaural time or level differences) appear to be stored in STM . It is worth noting that this relative independence of the memory traces for various auditory features does not preclude a storage of auditory objects as an entity in memory …”

A Review of Auditory Prediction and Its Potential Role in Tinnitus Perception

“…Sequential grouping cues may use Gestalt principles such as the old-plus-new heuristic (Bregman, 1990) whereby the auditory system removes continuations of previous sounds from incoming stimuli before proceeding to analyze novel input (Winkler et al, 2009;Bendixen, 2014). Units of regularities stored in auditory short-term memory may be a percept, such as spatial location or pitch (Mathias and von Kriegstein, 2014). Mill et al (2013) suggest that the auditory system constantly switches between various alternative chains before assigning the incoming sound to a final auditory object.…”