Name that percussive tune: Associative memory and amplitude envelope

A series of experiments demonstrated novel effects of amplitude envelope on associative memory, with tones exhibiting naturally decaying amplitude envelopes (e.g., those made by two wine glasses clinking) better associated with target objects than amplitude-invariant tones. In Experiment 1 participa...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) 2017-07, Vol.70 (7), p.1323-1343
Main Authors: Schutz, Michael, Stefanucci, Jeanine K., H. Baum, Sarah, Roth, Amber
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation
Amplitude envelope
Analysis of Variance
Association
Audition
Auditory perception
Auditory Perception - physiology
Female
Humans
Male
Memory
Mental Recall - physiology
Names
Nonlinear Dynamics
Paired associates
Photic Stimulation
Psychoacoustics
Recognition (Psychology) - physiology
Students
Timbre
Universities
Vitaceae
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:A series of experiments demonstrated novel effects of amplitude envelope on associative memory, with tones exhibiting naturally decaying amplitude envelopes (e.g., those made by two wine glasses clinking) better associated with target objects than amplitude-invariant tones. In Experiment 1 participants learned associations between household objects and 4-note tone sequences constructed of spectrally matched pure tones with either "flat" or "percussive" amplitude envelopes. Those hearing percussive tones correctly recalled significantly more sequence-object associations. Experiment 2 demonstrated that participants hearing percussive tones learned the associations more quickly. Experiment 3 used "reverse percussive" tones (percussive tones played backwards) to test whether differences in overall energy might account for this effect, finding they did not lead to the same level of performance as percussive tones. Experiment 4 varied the envelope at encoding and retrieval to determine which stage of the task was most affected by the envelope manipulation. Participants hearing percussive tones at both encoding and retrieval performed significantly better than the other three groups (i.e., flat at encoding/percussive at retrieval, etc.). We conclude that amplitude envelope plays an important role in learning and memory, a finding with relevance to psychological research on audition and associative memory, as well as practical relevance for improving human-computer interface design.
ISSN:1747-0218
1747-0226
DOI:10.1080/17470218.2016.1182562