Program in Psychology, New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Center for Information Technology, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
Behav Res Methods. 2024 Dec;56(8):8330-8348. doi: 10.3758/s13428-024-02477-2. Epub 2024 Sep 9.
Theories of visual working memory have seen significant progress through the use of continuous reproduction tasks. However, these tasks have mainly focused on studying visual features, with limited examples existing in the auditory domain. Therefore, it is unknown to what extent newly developed memory models reflect domain-general limitations or are specific to the visual domain. To address this gap, we developed a novel methodology: the Auditory Reproduction Task (ART). This task utilizes Shepard tones, which create an infinite rising or falling tone illusion by dissecting pitch chroma and height, to create a 1-360° auditory circular space. In Experiment 1, we validated the perceptual circularity and uniformity of this auditory stimulus space. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that auditory working memory shows similar set size effects to visual working memory-report error increased at a set size of 2 relative to 1, caused by swap errors. In Experiment 3, we tested the validity of ART by correlating reproduction errors with commonly used auditory and visual working memory tasks. Analyses revealed that ART errors were significantly correlated with performance in both auditory and visual working memory tasks, albeit with a stronger correlation observed with auditory working memory. While these experiments have only scratched the surface of the theoretical and computational constraints on auditory working memory, they provide a valuable proof of concept for ART. Further research with ART has the potential to deepen our understanding of auditory working memory, as well as to explore the extent to which existing models are tapping into domain-general constraints.
视觉工作记忆理论通过使用连续再现任务取得了重大进展。然而，这些任务主要集中在研究视觉特征上，在听觉领域的例子有限。因此，我们不知道新开发的记忆模型在多大程度上反映了一般领域的限制，或者是特定于视觉领域的。为了解决这一差距，我们开发了一种新的方法：听觉再现任务（ART）。该任务利用谢巴德音，通过剖析音高色度和高度来创建无限上升或下降的音调错觉，从而创建一个 1-360°的听觉圆形空间。在实验 1 中，我们验证了这种听觉刺激空间的感知循环性和均匀性。在实验 2 中，我们证明了听觉工作记忆表现出与视觉工作记忆相似的集大小效应——相对于 1，2 的集大小报告错误增加，这是由交换错误引起的。在实验 3 中，我们通过将再现错误与常用的听觉和视觉工作记忆任务相关联来测试 ART 的有效性。分析表明，ART 错误与听觉和视觉工作记忆任务的表现显著相关，尽管与听觉工作记忆的相关性更强。虽然这些实验只是触及了听觉工作记忆的理论和计算限制的表面，但它们为 ART 提供了一个有价值的概念验证。进一步研究 ART 有可能加深我们对听觉工作记忆的理解，并探索现有模型在多大程度上利用了一般领域的限制。
