Behavioral Lifetime of Human Auditory Sensory Memory Predicted by Physiological Measures

• Published in: Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Vol. 258; no. 5088; pp. 1668 - 1670
• Main Authors: Z.-L. Lu, Williamson, S. J., Kaufman, L.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC American Society for the Advancement of Science 04.12.1992; American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Auditory cortex; Auditory Cortex - physiology; Auditory perception; Behavioral psychophysiology; Biological and medical sciences; Cerebral cortex; Cerebral Cortex - physiology; Echoic memory; Electrophysiology; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Hearing; Humans; Loudness; Magnetic fields; Magnetoencephalography; Memory; Memory decay; Memory trace; Neurons - physiology; Physiological aspects; Physiological stimulation; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Psychophysics; Sensory memory; Human; Cartography; Cerebral cortex; Magnetoencephalography; Memory; Central nervous system; Exploration; Loundness; Cognition; Psychophysics; Auditory cortex; Hearing; Perception; Information storage; Brain (vertebrata)
• ISSN: 0036-8075; 1095-9203
• DOI: 10.1126/science.1455246

Noninvasive magnetoencephalography makes it possible to identify the cortical area in the human brain whose activity reflects the decay of passive sensory storage of information about auditory stimuli (echoic memory). The lifetime for decay of the neuronal activation trace in primary auditory cortex was found to predict the psychophysically determined duration of memory for the loudness of a tone. Although memory for the loudness of a specific tone is lost, the remembered loudness decays toward the global mean of all of the loudnesses to which a subject is exposed in a series of trials.