Rapid Communication: Interference in Short-Term Auditory Memory

Abstract

Although interference is a well-established forgetting function in short-term auditory memory, an adequate understanding of its underlying mechanisms and time course has yet to be attained. The present study therefore aimed to explore these issues in memory for timbre. Listeners compared standard and comparison complex tones, having distinct timbres (four components varying in frequency), over a 4.7-s retention interval and made a same-different response. This interval either was silent or included one of 15 distractor tones occurring 0 ms, 100 ms, or 1,200 ms after the standard. These distractors varied in the extent to which the frequencies of their component tones were shared with the standard. Performance in comparing the two tones was significantly impaired by distractors composed of novel frequencies, regardless of the temporal position at which the distractor occurred. These results were fully compatible with the recent timbre memory model (McKeown & Wellsted, 2009) and suggested that interference in auditory memory operates via a feature-overwriting mechanism.