Abstract
Past researchers of the integration of information in memory have typically required participants to attend to and/or commit to memory the stimuli conveying distinct features, rendering difficult the examination of whether the maintenance of the feature pairings can occur involuntarily. To address this issue, the integration of voice and location information in auditory sensory memory was measured using a cross-modal oddball task, in which task-irrelevant auditory deviants are known to capture attention in an involuntary fashion. Participants categorized visual digits presented shortly after to-be-ignored sounds. These sounds consisted in the same phoneme played simultaneously in both ears but in different voices (female in one ear, male in the other). On most trials, the pairing of voice to location was constant (standard sound). On rare and unpredictable trials, the voices swapped locations (deviant sound). In line with past work on attention capture by auditory novelty, the participants were significantly slower to judge the visual digits following the deviant sound, indicating the involuntary encoding of the links between voice and location in auditory memory. These results suggest that voices and locations are integrated in memory and that this binding occurs in conditions in which participants do not intend to commit any information to memory.
Article PDF
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Ahveninen, J., Jääskeläinen, I. P., Raij, T., Bonmassar, G., Devore, S., Hämäläinen, M., et al. (2006). Task-modulated “what” and “where” pathways in human auditory cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 103, 14608–14613.
Allen, R. J., Baddeley, A. D., & Hitch, G. J. (2006). Is the binding of visual features in working memory resource-demanding? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135, 298–313.
Andrés, P., Parmentier, F. B. R., & Escera, C. (2006). The effect of age on involuntary capture of attention by irrelevant sounds: A test of the frontal hypothesis of aging. Neuropsychologia, 44, 2564–2568.
Anourova, I., Rämä, P., Alho, K., Koivusalo, S., Kalmari, J., & Carlson, S. (1999). Selective interference reveals dissociation between auditory memory for location and pitch. NeuroReport, 10, 3543–3547.
Arnott, S. R., Binns, M. A., Grady, C. L., & Alain, C. (2004). Assessing the auditory dual-pathway model in humans. NeuroImage, 22, 401–408.
Berti, S., Roeber, U., & Schröger, E. (2004). Bottom-up influences on working memory: Behavioral and electrophysiological distraction varies with distractor strength. Experimental Psychology, 51, 249–257.
Bradlow, A. R., Nygaard, L. C., & Pisoni, D. B. (1999). Effects of talker, rate, and amplitude variation on recognition memory for spoken word. Perception & Psychophysics, 61, 206–219.
Clément, S., Demany, L., & Semal, C. (1999). Memory for pitch versus memory for loudness. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America, 106, 2805–2811.
Cowan, N., Winkler, I., Teder, W., & Näätänen, R. (1993). Shortand long-term prerequisites of the mismatch negativity in the auditory event-related potential (ERP). Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 19, 909–921.
Craik, F. I. M., & Kirsner, K. (1974). The effect of speaker’s voice on word recognition. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 26, 274–284.
Elsley, J. V., & Parmentier, F. B. R. (2009a). Is binding in visuospatial working memory impaired by a concurrent memory load? Manuscript submitted for publication.
Elsley, J. V., & Parmentier, F. B. R. (2009b). Is verbal-spatial binding in working memory impaired by a concurrent memory load? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62, 1696–1705.
Elsley, J. V., Parmentier, F. B. R., & Maybery, M. T. (2009). Feature binding within visuo-spatial working memory: Asymmetry between shape and location encoding. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Escera, C., Yago, E., & Alho, K. (2001). Electrical responses reveal the temporal dynamics of brain events during involuntary attention switching. European Journal of Neuroscience, 14, 877–883.
Fifer, W. P., & Moon, C. M. (1994). The role of mother’s voice in the organization of brain functions in the newborn. Acta Paediatrica, 83, 86–93.
Friedman, D., Cycowicz, Y. M., & Gaeta, H. (2001). The novelty P3: An event-related brain potential (ERP) sign of the brain’s evaluation of novelty. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 25, 355–373.
Gajewski, D. A., & Brockmole, J. R. (2006). Feature bindings endure without attention: Evidence from an explicit recall task. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13, 581–587.
Goh, W. D. (2005). Talker variability and recognition memory: Instancespecific and voice-specific effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 31, 40–53.
Hommel, B. (2004). Event files: Feature binding in and across perception and action. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 494–500.
Jiang, Y., Olson, I. R., & Chun, M. M. (2000). Organization of visual short-term memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology, Learning, Memory & Cognition, 26, 683–702.
Johnson, J. S., Hollingworth, A., & Luck, S. J. (2008). The role of attention in the maintenance of feature bindings in visual short-term memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 34, 41–55.
Levy, D. A., Granot, R., & Bentin, S. (2001). Processing specificity for human voice stimuli: Electrophysiological evidence. NeuroReport, 12, 2653–2657.
Maybery, M. T., Clissa, P. J., Parmentier, F. B. R., Leung, D., Harsa, G., Fox, A. M., & Jones, D. M. (2009). Binding of verbal and spatial features in auditory working memory. Journal of Memory & Language, 61, 112–133.
Mishkin, M., Ungerleider, L. G., & Macko, K. A. (1983). Object visuo and spatial vision: Two cortical pathways. Trends in Neurosciences, 6, 414–417.
Mitchell, K. J., Johnson, M. K., Raye, C. L., Mather, M., & D’Esposito, M. (2000). Aging and reflective processes of working memory: Binding and test load deficits. Psychology & Aging, 15, 527–541.
Näätänen, R., & Winkler, I. (1999). The concept of auditory stimulus representation in cognitive neuroscience. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 826–859.
Olson, I. R., & Marshuetz, C. (2005). Remembering “what” brings along “where” in visual working memory. Perception & Psychophysics, 67, 185–194.
Parmentier, F. B. R. (2008). Toward a cognitive model of distraction by auditory novelty: The role of involuntary attention capture and semantic processing. Cognition, 109, 345–362.
Parmentier, F. B. R., Elford, G., Escera, C., Andrés, P., & San Miguel, I. (2008). The cognitive locus of distraction by acoustic novelty in the cross-modal oddball task. Cognition, 106, 408–432.
Prabhakaran, V., Narayanan, K., Zhao, Z., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2000). Integration of diverse information in working memory within the frontal lobe. Nature Neuroscience, 3, 85–90.
Rämä, P., Poremba, A., Sala, J. B., Yee, L., Malloy, M., Mishkin, M., & Courtney, S. M. (2004). Dissociable functional cortical typologies for working memory maintenance of voice identity and location. Cerebral Cortex, 14, 768–780.
Rauschecker, J. P., & Tian, B. (2000). Mechanisms and streams for processing of “what” and “where” in auditory cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97, 11800–11806.
Rauschecker, J. P., Tian, B., & Hauser, M. (1995). Processing of complex sounds in the macaque nonprimary auditory cortex. Science, 268, 111–114.
Roeber, U., Berti, S., Widmann, A., & Schröger, E. (2005). Response repetition vs. response change modulates behavioral and electrophysiological effects of distraction. Cognitive Brain Research, 22, 451–456.
Romanski, L. M., Tian, B., Fritz, J., Mishkin, M., Goldman- Rakic, P. S., & Rauschecker, J. P. (1999). Dual streams of auditory afferents target multiple domains in the primate prefrontal cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 1131–1136.
Schröger, E. (1996). Interaural time and level differences: Integrated or separated processing? Hearing Research, 96, 191–198.
Sussman, E., Gomes, H., Nousak, J. M., Ritter, W., & Vaughan, H. G., Jr. (1998). Feature conjunctions and auditory sensory memory. Brain Research, 793, 95–102.
Takegata, R., Brattico, E., Tervaniemi, M., Varyagina, O., Näätänen, R., & Winkler, I. (2005). Preattentive representation of feature conjunctions for concurrent spatially distributed auditory objects. Cognitive Brain Research, 25, 169–179.
Van Valkenburg, D., Maybery, M. T., Leung, D., Kubovy, M., Parmentier, F. B. R., & Jones, D. M. (2009). The binding of pitch and loudness features in auditory memory. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Wheeler, M. E., & Treisman, A. M. (2002). Binding in short-term visual memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 131, 48–64.
Winkler, I., & Cowan, N. (2005). From sensory to long-term memory. Evidence from auditory memory reactivation studies. Experimental Psychology, 52, 3–20.
Winkler, I., Cowan, N., Csépe V., Czigler, I., & Näätänen, R. (1996). Interactions between transient and long-term auditory memory as reflected by the mismatch negativity. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 8, 403–415.
Winkler, I., Czigler, I., Sussman, E., Horváth J., & Balázs, L. (2005). Preattentive binding of auditory and visual stimulus features. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 320–339.
Wolfe, J. M., & Bennett, S. C. (1997). Preattentive object files: Shapeless bundles of basic features. Vision Research, 37, 25–43.
Wolff, C., & Schröger, E. (2001). Human pre-attentive auditory change-detection with single, double, and triple deviations as revealed by mismatch negativity additivity. Neuroscience Letters, 311, 37–40.
Zmigrod, S., & Hommel, B. (2009). Auditory event file: Integrating auditory perception and action planning. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 71, 352–362.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This research was supported by ESRC Grant RES-062-23-0241 to F.B.R.P. and Australian Research Council Grants DP0452312 and DP0773836 to M.T. M., F.B.R.P., and D. Jones.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Parmentier, F.B.R., Maybery, M.T. & Elsley, J. The involuntary capture of attention by novel feature pairings: A study of voice—location integration in auditory sensory memory. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 72, 279–284 (2010). https://doi.org/10.3758/APP.72.2.279
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/APP.72.2.279