STORAGE OF INFORMATION IN TRANSIENT AUDITORY MEMORY

This study concerns the manner in which features of auditory stimuli a re stored in acoustic memory. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were rec orded to sequences of tones in which sequential, infrequent deviant to nes were presented in a row, each of which differed from the frequent standard tones along a different stimulus dimension. The object was to determine whether a change in a single feature of a stimulus would ha ve an effect on the entire representation of the standard tone in memo ry, or only on the representation of the stimulus dimension by which t he first deviant differed from the standards. It was found that the am plitude of the mismatch negativity elicited by subsequent deviants was not reduced by the presence of the first deviant, supporting independ ent storage of features.