The memory of noise

Abstract. The memory of auditory random waveforms (i.e., noise) is a special case of auditory memory for sensory information. Five experiments are reported that evaluate the dynamics of this storage system as well as interactions with new input. Periodic waveforms can be discriminated from uncorrelated noise by naive listeners up to a cycle length of 20 s, with the major decline in performance between 5 and 10 s. Even single repetitions of a piece of the waveform can be detected up to a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 6 s. The capacity of this storage system is limited to a few items of, in total, a few hundred milliseconds length. Within this capacity, however, items do not interfere strongly. These results are compatible with the view that auditory sensory memory is a modality-specific module of short-term memory. Key words: sensory memory, short-term memory, auditory memory, categorical memory Working memory and sensory memory are often considered unlikely brothers. Working memory re-fers to the active and attention-controlled mainte-nance of information in the service of complex cog-nitive tasks such as problem solving and planning. These tasks involve in general operations on categor-ical information. In contrast to this, sensory memor