How loudness affects everyday sounds recognition?

Abstract

International audienceIt has been recently shown that loudness affects the perceptual representation of sounds. Following this idea, the present experiment examines whether recognition of everyday sounds is sensitive to study-to-test changes in sound pressure level. In addition, the experiment tests the hypothesis that the sound pressure level changes could hinder recognition more strongly when an encoding task focuses participants on sensory properties of the sounds (e.g., loudness) during the study phase. The study phase used three encoding tasks: sensory (participants rated loudness), semantic (participants categorized sounds in three categories), and control tasks. The test phase measured recognition scores and response times for a list of targets (sounds presented in the study phase) mixed with distractors, both presented at two different levels (L1: the level of the phase study; L2: 15 dB higher for half of the sounds, and 15 dB lower for the other half). Results reveal a significant effect of the level change on recognition scores; recognition is more accurate for sounds at L1. As predicted, recognition is weaker with the sensory encoding task, though the effect is not significant. Those results suggest that loudness is encoded together with semantic attributes in the memory representations of sounds