UC Merced

Auditory attention to memory is often overlooked compared to the visual domain. Our aim is to expand research within the auditory domain using a retro-cue paradigm. This paradigm allows us to investigate the attentional effects on auditory short-term memory representations through the strengthening and/or focusing of these memory representations. This study involved tasking participants to use their short-term auditory memory, and a visual retro-cue to detect a change in a temporal auditory feature, using amplitude modulated (AM) sounds. The visual retro-cue was either informative or uninformative. An informative retro-cue is a stimulus that effectively reduces the working memory load of the participant in accordance with the memory probe task, thereby increasing accuracy, d’, and/or response time on the memory probe task. The uninformative retro-cue is a stimulus that does not provide insight into the upcoming memory probe task and is used as a comparative baseline for the informative retro-cue. We hypothesized, based on past auditory research, that relative to uninformative retro-cues, the informative retro-cues would improve accuracy and response time, especially when detecting smaller changes in the probe’s amplitude modulated AM rate relative to its original AM rate. However, due to various limitations, our hypothesis was unable to be verified. Future directions solving these limitations will hopefully be taken in the future. We found trends in the data that, when the limitations are addressed, may lead to significance once the study is revisited.