Recognition of brief sounds in rapid serial auditory presentation

Two experiments were conducted to test the role of participant factors (i.e., musical sophistication, working memory capacity) and stimulus factors (i.e., sound duration, timbre) on auditory recognition using a rapid serial auditory presentation paradigm. Participants listened to a rapid stream of very brief sounds ranging from 30 to 150 milliseconds and were tested on their ability to distinguish the presence from the absence of a target sound selected from various sound sources placed amongst the distracters. Experiment 1a established that brief exposure to stimuli (60 to 150 milliseconds) does not necessarily correspond to impaired recognition. In Experiment 1b we found evidence that 30 milliseconds of exposure to the stimuli significantly impairs recognition of single auditory targets, but the recognition for voice and sine tone targets impaired the least, suggesting that the lower limit required for successful recognition could be lower than 30 milliseconds for voice and sine tone targets. Critically, the effect of sound duration on recognition completely disappeared when differences in musical sophistication were controlled for. Participants’ working memory capacities did not seem to predict their recognition performances. Our behavioral results extend the studies oriented to understand the processing of brief timbres under temporal constraint by suggesting that the musical sophistication may play a larger role than previously thought. These results can also provide a working hypothesis for future research, namely, that underlying neural mechanisms for the processing of various sound sources may have different temporal constraints.