Abstract
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 human auditory memory remains an outstanding question. In the current study, a short-term memory paradigm was used to test human subjects’ retention of simple auditory, visual, and tactile stimuli that were carefully equated in terms of discriminability, stimulus exposure time, and temporal dynamics. Mean accuracy did not differ significantly among sensory modalities at very short retention intervals (1–4 s). However, at longer retention intervals (8–32 s), accuracy for auditory stimuli fell substantially below that observed for visual and tactile stimuli. In the interest of extending the ecological validity of these findings, a second experiment tested recognition memory for complex, naturalistic stimuli that would likely be encountered in everyday life. Subjects were able to identify all stimuli when retention was not required, however, recognition accuracy following a delay period was again inferior for auditory compared to visual and tactile stimuli. Thus, the outcomes of both experiments provide a human parallel to the pattern of results observed in nonhuman primates. The results are interpreted in light of neuropsychological data from nonhuman primates, which suggest a difference in the degree to which auditory, visual, and tactile memory are mediated by the perirhinal and entorhinal cortices.
Highlights
It is well established that monkeys’ auditory memory capabilities fall substantially short of their visual and tactile memory capabilities [1,2,3,4,5]
These differences were confirmed by repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) with sensory modality and retention interval (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 s) as factors, which revealed main effects of both retention interval (F [5,265] = 57.88, p,.05) and sensory modality (F [2,106] = 11.61, p,.05), as well as a significant interaction of these factors (F [10,530] = 7.78, p,.05)
Post-hoc tests (p,.05; Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons) revealed that accuracy did not differ among sensory modalities at the 1–4 s retention intervals, suggesting that lower accuracy observed at the longer retention intervals in the auditory block was not attributable to differences in stimulus discriminability
Summary
It is well established that monkeys’ auditory memory capabilities fall substantially short of their visual and tactile memory capabilities [1,2,3,4,5]. Many studies have reported that monkeys require extensive training to learn auditory memory tasks [1,6,7]. Some of the earliest attempts to train monkeys on auditory memory tasks reported that subjects learned only ‘‘after years of failure’’, while others failed to learn at all [1,8]. Monkeys learn visual and tactile memory tasks relatively quickly and are capable of approximately 75% accuracy at retention intervals of 10 minutes or greater [9,10,11]. Inferior memory performance in auditory tasks has been observed in both Old World [3,6,7] and New World monkeys [1,8], as well as in a chimpanzee [12], raising the possibility that auditory memory may be deficient in nonhuman primates in general
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