Consolidation and retroactive interference in short-term recognition memory for pitch.

The present studies were carried out to investigate the effects of different retroactive stimuli on pitch discrimination in a short-term recognition memory task. Tones, Gaussian noise, and "Blank" stimuli were employed in the retroactive (interference) interval. Tones in the interference interval can enhance memory for pitch if the observer (0) employs the interference stimulus as a point of reference. However, if the (3 tries to ignore the interference stimulus, tones will interfere with pitch discrimination relative to Gaussian noise in the interference interval. Blank interference intervals did not produce any significant forgetting. This result cannot be attributed to the fact that Os may have rehearsed or hummed the tone during the blank interference interval. Furthermore, auditory stimuli in the interference interval not only prevent rehearsal but also actively affect the trace of the tone to be remembered. Therefore, the decrease in accuracy of perceptual memory over time in the present studies was attributed to interference rather than decay. Operating characteristics and a posteriori probability functions indicated that a continuous memory system underlies recognition memory for pitch. Both a storage-forgetting model and a diffusion model of perceptual memory described the quantitative results accurately.