Familiarization with meaningless sound patterns facilitates learning to detect those patterns among distracters.

Autor: Wisniewski MG; Department of Psychological Sciences, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, United States.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Frontiers in psychology [Front Psychol] 2022 Sep 14; Vol. 13, pp. 957389. Date of Electronic Publication: 2022 Sep 14 (Print Publication: 2022).
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.957389
Abstrakt: Initially "meaningless" and randomly generated sounds can be learned over exposure. This is demonstrated by studies where repetitions of randomly determined sound patterns are detected better if they are the same sounds presented on previous trials than if they are novel. This experiment posed two novel questions about this learning. First, does familiarization with a sound outside of the repetition detection context facilitate later performance? Second, does familiarization enhance performance when repeats are interleaved with distracters? Listeners were first trained to categorize a unique pattern of synchronous complex tone trains (210 ms in duration) from other tone trains with similar qualities (familiarization phase). They were then tasked to detect repeated pattern presentations interleaved with similar distracters in 4.2 s long excerpts (repetition detection phase). The familiarized pattern (Familiar Fixed - FF), an unfamiliar pattern that remained fixed throughout (Unfamiliar Fixed - UF), or patterns that were uniquely determined on each trial (Unfamiliar Unfixed - UU) could be presented as repeats. FF patterns were learned at a faster rate and achieved higher repetition detection sensitivity than UF and UU patterns. Similarly, FF patterns also showed steeper learning slopes in their response times (RTs) than UF patterns. The data show that familiarity with a "meaningless" sound pattern on its own (i.e., without repetition) can facilitate repetition detection even in the presence of distracters. Familiarity effects become most apparent in the potential for learning.
Competing Interests: The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
(Copyright © 2022 Wisniewski.)
Databáze: MEDLINE