Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis, CA 95618, USA.
J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2013 Apr;39(2):399-412. doi: 10.1037/a0029720. Epub 2012 Sep 10.
Properties of auditory working memory for sounds that lack strong semantic associations and are not readily verbalized or sung are poorly understood. We investigated auditory working memory capacity for lists containing 2-6 easily discriminable abstract sounds synthesized within a constrained timbral space, at delays of 1-6 s (Experiment 1), and the effect of greater perceptual variability among list items on capacity estimates at delays of 1-6 s (Experiment 2). Working memory capacity estimates of 1-2 items were found in all conditions and increased significantly as the perceptual variability among the list items increased. Nonetheless, the capacity estimates were smaller than the commonly observed average working memory capacity limit of 3-5 items. Decay profiles in both experiments were comparable with those previously reported in the verbal and auditory working memory literature. The results help define boundary conditions on capacity estimates for nonverbalizable timbres that lack strong long-term memory associations.
对于缺乏强烈语义关联且不易口头表达或演唱的声音，其听觉工作记忆的特性尚未被充分理解。我们研究了包含 2-6 个容易区分的抽象声音的列表的听觉工作记忆容量，这些声音是在受限的音色空间内合成的，延迟时间为 1-6 秒（实验 1），以及在延迟时间为 1-6 秒时，列表项目之间更大的感知可变性对容量估计的影响（实验 2）。在所有条件下都发现了 1-2 个项目的工作记忆容量估计值，并且随着列表项目之间的感知可变性的增加而显著增加。尽管如此，这些容量估计值小于通常观察到的 3-5 个项目的平均工作记忆容量限制。两个实验中的衰减曲线与以前在言语和听觉工作记忆文献中报告的相似。结果有助于确定缺乏强烈长期记忆关联的不可言语化音色的容量估计的边界条件。
