Skip navigation

Seminars in Hearing Research (01/16/25) - Malinda McPherson

Seminars in Hearing Research (01/16/25) - Malinda McPherson

Author: M. Heinz
Event Date: January 16, 2025
Hosted By: Maureen Shader
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 pm
Location: Nelson 1215
Contact Name: Shader, Maureen J
Contact Email: mshader@purdue.edu
Open To: All
Priority: No
School or Program: Non-Engineering
College Calendar: Show
Malinda McPherson, Assistant Professor, SLHS will present "Eye Hear You: Comparing Auditory and Visual Memory Capacity and Structure" at our Seminars in Hearing Research at Purdue (SHRP) on January 16, at noon - 1:00 pm.

Seminars in Hearing Research

Date: Thursday, January 16, 2025

Location: Nelson 1215

Time: Noon - 1:00 pm

Speaker: Malinda McPherson,  Assistant Professor, SLHS  

Title: Eye Hear You: Comparing Auditory and Visual Memory Capacity and Structure.

Abstract:  While there is growing interest in auditory/visual similarities, differences, and interactions, it is not always obvious how to compare these, and other, sensory domains. However, building broad theories of perception will ultimately require understanding how all the senses integrate and store information. In this talk, I will discuss experiments that tested new approaches for comparing visual and auditory memory capacity and structure. Based on previous results showing visual memory is better than auditory memory, we hypothesized that visual stimuli might be more inherently dissociable (dissimilar) than auditory stimuli, suggesting that with randomly selected stimuli, auditory memory performance would appear worse than visual memory simply because of the confusability of the memory probes. To test this, we use developments in deep convolutional neural networks to select well-controlled stimuli ranging from maximally similar to maximally dissimilar for both visual and auditory stimuli. We also predicted that the presentation mode (simultaneous vs. sequential) would differentially impact auditory vs. visual memory. We found that hearing is more sensitive to similarity structure than vision: auditory performance worsens more rapidly than visual performance as memory probe similarity increases. Still, by changing experimental paradigms, we could observe better overall auditory memory performance than visual performance, vice versa, or comparable performance. Therefore, when comparing vision and audition, or even when examining memory for different stimuli within audition, the choice of stimuli and experimental parameters can drastically change the ultimate conclusions. Overall, information is retrieved differently in vision and hearing: vision is inherently spatial, and hearing is intrinsically temporal, and it is critical to account for these and other differences when working across the senses.

 

 ---

The working schedule is available here: https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_schedule

 

The titles and abstracts of the talks will be added here: https://purdue.edu/TPAN/hearing/shrp_abstracts