Encoding and recognition memory for naturalistic sounds

The question examined was whether a naturalistic sound is remembered chiefly in terms of the "object interpretation " 5 assigns to it (e.g., sonar pings, crickets chirping). If so, and if the sound is reinterpreted in a different way during testing, then 5 should not remember having heard it in an earlier set. Subjects listened to a set of ambiguous sounds and received a later recognition memory test with old and new stimuli. Some 5's labeled the sounds themselves whereas others had the sounds labeled for them during study and testing. Recognition memory was much higher for old sounds given their old labels during testing than for those receiving new (though plausible) labels, with equal effects for 5-labeled and ^-labeled stimuli. Moreover, false alarms to new sounds were partly determined by their eliciting the labels of old stimuli. It is concluded that recognition memory largely reflects the similarity of the referential interpretations that 5 provides for the study and test sounds. This study investigates the influence on recognition memory of the perceptual or-ganization of the learning material both at the time it is studied and when it is tested. Most of the earlier work on this topic has used visual stimuli (e.g., Leeper, 1970) or verbal materials (e.g., Light & Carter-Sobell, 1970). The present work extends these investigations to "natural-istic sounds, " a relatively unexplored stim-ulus domain for psychologists, It is assumed that when 5 hears a naturalistic sound (e.g., a carpet sweeper, crickets chirping), he tries to interpret the referent of that sound, perhaps by com-paring it with a set of prototypes in memory. When the test is sufficiently close to a prototype sound, we will say that S assimilates the input to that pro-totype. In a recognition memory experi-ment in which S hears many different naturalistic sounds to remember, it is as-sumed that he establishes an association between each "sound-as-interpreted " (the referent) and a context marker. This as-sociation essentially encodes the proposi-tion, "In the study list I heard a soun