Abstract
Recent research has begun measuring auditory working memory with a continuous adjustment task in which listeners adjust attributes of a sound to match a stimulus presented earlier. This approach captures auditory memory's continuous nature better than standard change detection paradigms that collect binary ("same or different") memory measurements. In two experiments, we assessed the impact of different interference stimuli (multitone complexes vs. white noise vs. silence) on the precision and accuracy of participants' reproductions of pitch from memory. Participants were presented with a target multitone complex stimulus followed by eight successive interference signals. Across trials, these signals alternated between additional multitone complexes, randomly generated white noise samples, or (in Experiment 2) silence. This was followed by a response period where participants adjusted the pitch of a response stimulus using a MIDI touchpad to match the target. Experiment 1 found a significant effect of interference type on performance, with tone interference signals producing the greatest impairments to participants' accuracy and precision compared to white noise. Interestingly, it also found a compression in the participants' responses, with overestimations of low-frequency targets and underestimations for high-frequency targets. Experiment 2 replicated results from Experiment 1, with an additional silence condition showing the best performance, suggesting that non-tonal signals also generate interference. In general, results support a shared resource model of working memory with a limited capacity that can be flexibly allocated to hold items in memory with varying levels of fidelity. Interference does not appear to knock items out of a fixed precision slot, but rather robs a portion of capacity from stored items.
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Notes
Additional post hoc analysis was conducted to rule out the alternative explanation that these effects were the result of participants’ reduced attention/effort to the task in the tone inference condition. Assuming that participants who were not trying would take less time to submit a response, reaction time data was analyzed, and no significant differences were found for reaction time for the tone (M = 4.06, SD= 1.75 ) vs noise (M = 3.74 , SD = 1.64 ) conditions t(23) = 1.75, p = 0.94. The code for this analysis, including the specific results of the statistical test can be found in the MATLAB script “RTExplore” in the supplemental materials.
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Research reported in this publication was supported by the Cognitive and Neurobiological Approaches to Plasticity (CNAP) Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) of the National Institutes of Health under grant number P20GM113109. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
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Tollefsrud, M.A., Joyner, C.N., Zakrzewski, A.C. et al. Not fully remembered, but not forgotten: interfering sounds worsen but do not eliminate the representation of pitch in working memory. Atten Percept Psychophys (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-024-02845-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-024-02845-2