Long-term memory
Does hearing an object's sound help you remember where you saw it?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Seeing an object together with its matching sound, like a frog with a ribbit, improved memory for which scene it appeared in, but did not help memory for other objects shown beside it.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Within-subject manipulation of sound congruency at incidental encoding (congruent object sound vs white noise) followed by surprise memory tests: item recognition with confidence-based ROCs (Exps 1a, 1b) and 4-alternative environment source memory plus location memory in virtual scenes (Exp 2)
- N
- N=168 · 50 analysed in Exp 1a (from over a hundred tested), 50 in Exp 1b (of 83 tested) and 68 in Exp 2 (of 209 tested); each experiment used different undergraduates, and the high exclusion rates followed preregistered criteria.
- Population
- Undergraduate students at the University of California, Davis, tested online for course credit
- Outcome
- Recollection (ROC y-intercept), familiarity (d') and overall recognition (AUC) for congruent-sound, neighbouring and control objects; environment source memory, confidence and location accuracy
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Key findings
In Experiment 1a, objects heard with their matching sound were better recollected than control objects, but the object sitting next to them gained no significant benefit, and familiarity and overall recognition were unaffected. In Experiment 1b, where the task made people relate the two objects, the sound benefit disappeared entirely. In Experiment 2, environment source memory was better for objects paired with matching sounds than with white noise (mean proportion correct 0.41 versus 0.38, a small effect), but memory for exact location did not differ.
Methodology
In Experiments 1a and 1b, students saw pairs of objects with a sound that matched one of them or with meaningless white noise, while doing a size judgement (1a) or rating how related the two objects were (1b). A surprise recognition test with confidence ratings let the authors separate recollection (remembering details) from familiarity. In Experiment 2, students searched for objects placed in scenes from four learned virtual environments while hearing either the object's sound or white noise, and were later asked which environment each object had been in and where.
Limitations
The source-memory benefit was small and one-tailed, and the location task was so hard that performance was near guessing, so a location benefit could have been missed. Studies were run online with large preregistered exclusions (for example, well over half of Experiment 1a's participants were dropped for not understanding the 'recollect' response), which may limit generality. Experiments 1a and 1b tested memory for single objects, not for the pairing between objects, so they cannot say whether sounds help associative memory for object pairs. The study also cannot separate true audiovisual integration from the sound simply reinforcing the object's identity.
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