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Short-term retention of auditory stimuli declines at a greater rate than retention of visual or tactile stimuli. There were no differences in accuracy among the sensory modalities for trials with brief retention intervals (1–4 s), indicating that the initial discriminability of the stimuli was approximately equal. However, at longer retention intervals (8–32 s), accuracy for auditory trials was significantly lower than visual and tactile trials. Post-hoc tests (p<.05, Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons): *Accuracy in the auditory block significantly lower than the tactile block. †Accuracy in the auditory block significantly lower than the visual block.
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STUDIES OF THE MEMORY CAPABILITIES OF NONHUMAN PRIMATES HAVE CONSISTENTLY REVEALED A RELATIVE WEAKNESS FOR AUDITORY COMPARED TO VISUAL OR TACTILE STIMULI: extensive training is required to learn auditory memory tasks, and subjects are only capable of retaining acoustic information for a brief period of time. Whether a parallel deficit exists in hum...
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... This is largely in contrast to findings in non-human primates (NHP), where no WM related persistent ac6vity is found during the maintenance period in these areas (Lemus et al., 2009;Sreenivasan et al., 2014). The iden6fica6on of content-specific persistent firing paLerns at the sensory level has proven challenging in NHP studies of auditory WM as well (Bigelow and Poremba, 2014;Ng et al., 2014;ScoL et al., 2014). Human studies, on the other hand, have managed to decode auditory WM content from fMRI signals Czoschke et al., 2021;Kumar et al., 2016;Uluç et al., 2018) as well as intracranial EEG signals (Uluç et al., 2023) . ...
Working memory (WM), short term maintenance of information for goal directed behavior, is essential to human cognition. Identifying the neural mechanisms supporting WM is a focal point of neuroscientific research. One prominent theory hypothesizes that WM content is carried in a dynamic fashion, involving an activity-silent brain state based on synaptic facilitation. Information carried in such activity-silent brain states could be decodable from content-specific changes in responses to unrelated "impulse stimuli". A potential method for such impulses is single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with its focal, precise nature. Here, we tested the activity-silent model by combining TMS/EEG and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) with a non-conceptual auditory WM task that employed parametric ripple sound stimuli and a retro-cue design. Our MVPA employed between-subject cross-validation and robust non-parametric permutation testing. The decoding accuracy of WM content significantly increased after a single pulse TMS was delivered to the posterior superior temporal cortex during WM maintenance. Our results are compatible with the theory that WM maintenance involves brain states which are effectively "activity-silent" relative to other intrinsic processes visible in the EEG signal. Single-pulse TMS combined with MVPA could provide a powerful way to decode information content of activity-silent brain states involved in WM.
... These findings could be explained by Bigelow and Poremba [24] , who pointed out that human memory capacity for acoustic information is somewhat limited and that recognition accuracy for auditory stimuli is lower than that for visual stimuli. These findings precisely align with those of Mayer [25] , who postulated that children who spend more time using technology than non-technological activities would have decreased AM and increased or unchanged VM. ...
... A more recent line of work has demonstrated that pictures have a mnemonic advantage over sounds (Ahmad et al., 2023;Bigelow & Poremba, 2014;M. A. Cohen et al., 2009;Gloede & Gregg, 2019). ...
The picture-superiority effect is the finding that memory for pictures exceeds memory for words on many tasks. According to dual-coding theory, the pictures’ mnemonic advantage stems from their greater likelihood to be labelled relative to words being imaged. In contrast, distinctiveness accounts hold that the greater variability of pictures compared to words leads to their mnemonic advantage. Ensor, Surprenant, et al. tested these accounts in old/new and forced-choice recognition by increasing the physical distinctiveness of words and decreasing the physical distinctiveness of pictures. Half of the words were presented in standard black font, and half were presented in varying font styles, font sizes, font colours, and capitalisation patterns. Half of the pictures were presented in black and white and half in colour. Consistent with the physical-distinctiveness account but contrary to the dual-coding account, the picture-superiority effect was eliminated when comparing the black-and-white pictures to distinctive words. In the present study, we extend Ensor, Surprenant, et al.’s results to associative recognition and free recall. Results were consistent with physical distinctiveness. We argue that dual-coding theory is no longer a viable explanation of the picture-superiority effect.
... (Bigelow & Poremba, 2014;Cohen et al., 2009; ...
Memorability, the likelihood that a stimulus is remembered, is an intrinsic stimulus property that is highly consistent across people—participants tend to remember and forget the same faces, objects, and more. However, these consistencies in memory have thus far only been observed for visual stimuli. We provide the first study of auditory memorability, collecting recognition memory scores from over 3000 participants listening to a sequence of different speakers saying the same sentence. We found significant consistency across participants in their memory for voice clips and for speakers across different utterances. Next, we tested regression models incorporating both low-level (e.g., fundamental frequency) and high-level (e.g., dialect) voice properties to predict their memorability. These models were significantly predictive, and cross-validated out-of-sample, supporting an inherent memorability of speakers’ voices. These results provide the first evidence that listeners are similar in the voices they remember, which can be reliably predicted by quantifiable voice features.
... For example, if students are visual learners, they prefer diagrams and mind maps; auditory learners, they like listening; and read-write learners, they like word list. However, kinesthetic learners prefer hands-on experience (Bigelow & Poremba, 2014). Additionally, it was determined that the student's visual and tactile recall was superior to their aural recall (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014) and hands-on learning activities promote long-term memory and create a more profound knowledge of the material, making it more pleasant (Prosser & Trigwell, 2017). ...
Objective: Understanding the body's anatomical structures is critical for surgical safety and a crucial pillar of medical curricula, whether integrated or traditional. The students need to comprehend and memorize a significant amount of Anatomical information that seems to burden them. Hence, the paper modelling strategy is designed to help better learning with proper knowledge retention. Our study aims to assess the effectiveness of the modeling technique; concerning the students' performance and feedback at the module's conclusion. Methods: The study used a quasi-experimental study involving 88 medical students who performed the paper modeling for seven weeks and included two weekly activity sessions. We used overhead projector sheets, color markers, and measuring tape for the students to create the muscle models and stick them to the skeleton with poster tack. Results: Data analysis revealed that the students in the treatment groups achieved significantly higher scores (72.7%) than their peers (21.3 %), with a substantial disparity in the mean ratings between the two groups, p<0.001. Moreover, the students' feedback about this method showed that 70 to 73% agreed that the new approach helped them to comprehend and retain information about muscle locations, attachment sites, and actions and allowed them to have in-depth discussions with their peers. Conclusions: The modeling method used in the current study was well appreciated by the students and enhanced their performance because it relied on the benefits of peer-to-peer instruction and embraced combined visual and kinesthetic learning styles.
... Several studies have noted reduced working memory performance with auditory memoranda compared to visual stimuli in working memory tasks in non-human primates [52][53][54][55]. In fact, human subjects also perform worse during auditory working memory tasks and have demonstrated steeper forgetting curves for auditory stimuli compared to visual stimuli [56][57][58]. In Hwang & Romanski [21], in trials where both the face and the vocalization stimulus were changed (a different congruent audiovisual pair is used as the non-match), the behavioural accuracy was similar, but not better, than the accuracy for detecting the visual change alone. ...
The ventral frontal lobe is a critical node in the circuit that underlies communication, a multisensory process where sensory features of faces and vocalizations come together. The neural basis of face and vocal integration is a topic of great importance since the integration of multiple sensory signals is essential for the decisions that govern our social interactions. Investigations have shown that the macaque ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), a proposed homologue of the human inferior frontal gyrus, is involved in the processing, integration and remembering of audiovisual signals. Single neurons in VLPFC encode and integrate species-specific faces and corresponding vocalizations. During working memory, VLPFC neurons maintain face and vocal information online and exhibit selective activity for face and vocal stimuli. Population analyses indicate that identity, a critical feature of social stimuli, is encoded by VLPFC neurons and dictates the structure of dynamic population activity in the VLPFC during the perception of vocalizations and their corresponding facial expressions. These studies suggest that VLPFC may play a primary role in integrating face and vocal stimuli with contextual information, in order to support decision making during social communication.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Decision and control processes in multisensory perception’.
... Evidence is also emerging that not only are posterior and sensory areas involved in WM maintenance, but the neuronal processes maintaining WM do not necessarily depend on persistently elevated neuronal firing. The smaller number of neurophysiological studies in the auditory domain are consistent with this notion, suggesting that persistent delay-period spiking patterns, which were reported in certain early NHP and rodent studies (Gottlieb et al., 1989;Sakurai, 1990), do not necessarily carry information about the maintained content (Bigelow and Poremba, 2014;Ng et al., 2014;Scott et al., 2014). ...
How the human brain maintains information in working memory (WM), a process critical for all our goal-directed function, has been debated for decades. Classic neurophysiological models, which argue that WM is maintained via persistent content-specific delay activity, have been challenged by alternative ideas suggesting a combination of dynamic activity patterns and activity-silent mechanisms. Here, making use of human intracranial stereo-EEG (sEEG) recordings and machine learning techniques, we tested understudied auditory WM in multiple cortical and subcortical brain areas. Neuronal activity was quantified as broadband high frequency activity (HFA, 70-190 Hz), which has been shown to be highly correlated with multiunit activity of neuron populations. Our multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) results, validated via robust non-parametric permutation testing, show that information can be decoded from multiple brain areas including frontal and auditory areas as well as hippocampus. However, the recording sites with high decoding accuracies were not accompanied by statistically significant increases in HFA power. In contrast, HFA power was reduced relative to the pre-trial period in many in frontal, auditory cortex, and hippocampal sEEG recording sites. These results are in line with the hypothesis that WM maintenance can be supported by highly dynamic activity silent processes, rather than via persistent activity only.
... Recognition accuracy in the experiments were consistently and substantially lower for sounds than visual scenes. Similarly, Bigelow and Poremba (Bigelow & Poremba, 2014) reported that human auditory WM performance was inferior to that of visual, specifically with retention periods longer than a few seconds. Comparable findings have been reported in behavioral studies in non-human primates (Colombo & D'Amato, 1986;Scott, Mishkin, & Yin, 2012), as well as in recent neurophysiological studies in humans (Wolff, Kandemir, Stokes, & Akyurek, 2020). ...
... In the control unimodal Experiment 2, this effect was significant only in the auditory runs, but a slight trend towards a similar effect was also observable in the visual runs. This could be seen as supporting the trend observed in many other studies where the retention of auditory items has decreased more rapidly as a function of increasing delay than visual retention (Bigelow & Poremba, 2014;Jensen, 1971). However, it is worth noting that in the comparison at individual delay conditions, there were no significant differences in PCR between the two modalities at either the shorter or longer delay conditions in our unimodal Experiment 2. Finally, no statistically significant differences were observed in PCR between trials where the participant was retrospectively cued to maintain the first vs. ...
Working memory (WM) reflects the transient maintenance of information in the absence of external input, which can be attained via multiple senses separately or simultaneously. Pertaining to WM, the prevailing literature suggests the dominance of vision over other sensory systems. However, this imbalance may be attributed to challenges of finding stimuli that are represented in comparable ways across modalities. Here, we addressed this methodological problem by using a balanced multisensory "retro-cue" WM design. The to-be-memorized stimuli consisted of combinations of auditory (ripple sounds) and visuospatial (Gabor patches) patterns, which have been shown to undergo similar transformations during WM encoding and retrieval. Using a staircase procedure, the auditory ripple velocities and spatial frequencies of Gabor patches were adjusted relative to each participant's just noticeable differences (JND) separately in each modality, before the main task. The task was to audiovisually compare the probes to the memorized items. In randomly ordered trials, the probe either fully matched or differed from the memory item auditorily, visually, or audiovisually. The participants correctly rejected a significantly larger number of auditory non-match probes than visual non-match probes. Our findings suggest that, in the case of inter-sensory competition during feature maintenance, auditory attributes of multisensory WM items can be retrieved more precisely than their visual counterparts when complexity of the content and task demands are bimodally equated.
... An interesting finding by Bigelow and Poremba (2014) is that, in general, humans-like our nonhuman primate relatives-may have a weakness for remembering auditory compared with visual and tactile stimuli. More interesting, perhaps, is that in their experiment, performance on both recognition and recall did not differ between sensory modalities at smaller intervals of 1-4 seconds, but at longer retention intervals (8-32 seconds) accuracy for auditory stimuli worsened compared to retention for the visual or tactile stimuli. ...
This paper offers a critical reflection on the paucity of theories for the phenomenon of “earworms,” also known as involuntary musical imagery (INMI), and poses some as-yet unanswered questions relating to the unique nature of the phenomenon, the optimal conditions for earworm induction, as well the underlying mechanisms that may drive the behavior. While numerous earworm studies have focused on analyzing the symptoms of the phenomenon, few studies have attempted to focus on investigating the underlying cause. In addition, common explanations are typically tied to proximal rather than distal causes (e.g., recent exposure). In particular, the question of “why music” (as opposed to other time-based auditory stimuli such as language/poetry), or, perhaps “what about music” is raised, and some conjectures and starting places for future studies are offered. Possible theoretical avenues and testable hypotheses are suggested, based on synthesizing informal observations and existing empirical research across multiple disciplines.
... Auditory recognition, however, tends to be worse than recognition in the visual (Cohen, Horowitz & Wolfe, 2009) or tactile sensory modalities. Bigelow and Poremba (2014) have examined memory recognition for visual (silent videos), auditory (complex sound of everyday life) and tactile (objects of common use hidden and presented in such a way that they can be touched and manipulated) stimuli, showing that auditory recognition is significantly worse than in other modalities, with no significant differences between visual or tactile stimuli. Cohen et al. (2009) have argued that auditory recognition is worse than other modalities due to our tendency to primarily rely on visual stimuli. ...
Our world is full of sounds, either verbal or non-verbal, pleasant or unpleasant , meaningful or simply irrelevant noise. Understanding, memorizing, and predicting the sounds, even non-verbal ones which our environment is full of, is a complex perceptuo-cognitive function that we constantly refine by everyday experience and learning. Musical sounds are a peculiar case due to their culture-dependent complexity and hierarchical organization requiring cognitive functions such as memory to be understood, and due to the presence of individuals (musicians) who dedicate their lifetime to master the specifics of those sounds and rules. Thus far, most of the neuroimaging research focused on verbal sounds and how they are processed and stored in the human brain. Only recently, researchers have tried to elucidate the neural mechanisms and structures allowing non-verbal, musical sounds to be mod-eled, predicted and remembered. However, those neuroimaging studies often provide only a mere snapshot of a complex dynamic process unfolding over time. To capture the complexity of musical memory and cognition, new methods are needed. A promising analysis method is dynamic functional connectivity, which assumes that functional connectivity changes in a short time. We conclude that moving from a locationist to a dynamic perspective on auditory memory might allow us to finally comprehend the neural mechanisms that regulate encoding and retrieval of sounds.
