Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to examine the nature of auditory representations by manipulating the semantic and physical relationships between auditory objects. On each trial, listeners heard a group of four simultaneous sounds for 1 sec, followed by 350 msec of noise, and then either the same sounds or three of the same plus a new one. Listeners completed a change-detection task and an object-encoding task. For change detection, listeners made a same-different judgment for the two groups of sounds. Object encoding was measured by presenting probe sounds that either were or were not present in the two groups. In Experiments 1 and 3, changing the target to an object that was acoustically different from but semantically the same as the original target resulted in more errors on both tasks than when the target changed to an acoustically and semantically different object. In Experiment 2, comparison of semantic and acoustic effects demonstrated that acoustics provide a weaker cue than semantics for both change detection and object encoding. The results suggest that listeners rely more on semantic information than on physical detail.)
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This work was supported by NIMH Grant R0151663. This project was presented at the 2007 meeting of the Cognitive Science Association for Interdisciplinary Learning and at the 2007 meeting of the Psychonomic Society. We thank Donna Kat for programming the experiments and for the tireless technical assistance.
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Gregg, M.K., Samuel, A.G. The importance of semantics in auditory representations. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 71, 607–619 (2009). https://doi.org/10.3758/APP.71.3.607
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/APP.71.3.607