Perception and memory for novel auditory stimuli: Similarity, serial position, and list homogeneity

We present four experiments that examine perception and memory for a novel set of auditory stimuli, using multidimensional scaling and cognitive modeling to clarify how people perceive and recognize these items. The stimuli are auditory "textures" constructed by adjusting the distribution of power across upper frequency bands. In Experiment 1, people rated similarity between pairs of stimuli; in Experiments 2 and 3, they also engaged in a recognition memory task using the same stimuli. In Experiment 4, they did all the same tasks from the first three experiments and rated stimuli for distinctiveness. Multidimensional scaling suggested the stimuli were perceived along three dimensions, a result which replicated across all four experiments. While recognition performance was affected by similarity, serial position, and list homogeneity, it was not related to distinctiveness ratings. These effects were accommodated by the exemplar-based random walk model (Nosofsky & Palmeri, 1997), extending prior work (Visscher et al., 2007) to show that recognition memory and similarity perception for static stimuli in the auditory domain are fundamentally like those for static stimuli in the visual domain-though particularly strong recency effects in the auditory domain suggest the influence of an additional sensory representation like echoic memory. We conclude by discussing how the stimuli introduced in this article can be used as "building blocks" to test hypotheses about perception and memory for complex, naturalistic sounds such as speech or music while retaining tight experimental control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).