Macken, B. & Jones, D.
School of Psychology, Cardiff University, U.K.
The ability to compare the frequency of two tones separated by an interval of a few seconds decreases as the length of the interval increases and is also impaired by the presence between standard and comparison tones of other, task-irrelevant tones. Such performance is typically attributed to auditory memory processes, such that a volatile representation of the first tone is subject to decay and/or interference as a function of time and/or the presence of similar intervening material. Here we show that such an auditory memory account is wrong since, in direct contradiction to such an account, tone discrimination can be shown to actually improve under conditions where the temporal interval between standard and comparison is increased and where the quantity of similar intervening material is increased. Rather than explaining this performance in terms of auditory memory, we argue that it reflects processes involved in comparing features within and across auditory objects, with the latter leading to poorer discrimination performance than the former.