Perception and Memory for Novel Auditory Stimuli: Similarity, Serial Position, and List Homogeneity

We present four experiments that examine perception and memory for a novel set ofauditory stimuli, using multidimensional scaling and cognitive modeling to clarify howindividual people perceive and recognize these items. The stimuli are auditory “textures”constructed by adjusting the distribution of power across upper frequency bands. In Experiment1, people rated similarity between pairs of stimuli; in Experiments 2 and 3, they also engaged ina recognition memory task using the same stimuli. In Experiment 4, they did all the same tasksfrom the first three experiments, and rated stimuli for distinctiveness. Multidimensional scalingsuggested the stimuli were perceived along three dimensions, a result which replicated across allfour experiments. Similarity ratings, recency, and list homogeneity predicted recognitionperformance, but distinctiveness ratings did not. These effects were accommodated by theExemplar-Based Random Walk model (Nosofsky and Palmeri, 1997)—extending prior work(Visscher et al., 2007) to show that memory and attention processes in the auditory domain arefundamentally like those in the visual domain, though particularly strong recency effects in theauditory domain may be due to echoic memory. We conclude by discussing how the stimuliintroduced in this article can be used as “building blocks” to test hypotheses about perceptionand memory for complex, naturalistic sounds such as speech or music while retaining tightexperimental control.