The effect of the Phonological Store material on an Auditory Control task

Abstract -- The human working memory system consists of 2 parts, a visual-spatial sketchpad and a verbal loop, often called the phonological loop. The phonological loop is further known to be constituted of a phonological store that maintains temporary traces of auditory material and an articulatory rehearsal component that aids in maintaining these traces. The present study aims at understanding the influence of the material stored in the Phonological Store in the form of Phonological codes on articulatory tasks. The results show that the phonological store material does influence auditory tasks (in this case, an auditory search task). It also reveals the automatic diversion of overt attention towards objects that are stored in the phonological store and its influence on the search task. The current study will help enhance our understanding of the articulatory working memory. This understanding is, in turn, crucial for duplicating systems for computational purposes and formulating theories about the auditory working memory.

Keywords: Phonological Store, Phonological loop, working memory, articulatory task, audio memory

The given project was carried out as a part of the course SE367: Cognitive Science under Prof. Amitabha Mukerjee as a part of the fifth semester curriculum.

This webpage summarises all the phases of the project from the proposal, the experimental interface, the data analysis to the final report. The different links on the right and the top can be used to view the above mentioned.

• The proposal can be found under the proposal section.
• The experiment and the instructions for taking the experiment are under the experiments section.
• The final presentation given in class and the final report and its pdf version that includes the abstract, the previous research work, the reults, their discussions and the conclusions is under the final report section.
• The appendix contains the link to the audio files used in the experiment, the data collected during the experiment, the graphs obtained and the php code that created the experiment.
• The references are given under the References subsection.

In a nutshell,the aspects of the auditory working memory as shown by this experiment are:

• Auditory input is stored in the form of phonological codes and similar codes interfere with each other.
• In case of semantic or sound similarity of two words, an additional verification step is involved in order to be sure of a response.
• Verifying meaning is much more difficult than verifying sounds.
• Storage in the working memory also includes a dimension of semantics despite the fact that it hinders the search tasks. However, this aspect can be deliberately masked.
• People tend to associate meanings even with nonsensical words in order to remember them. This was evident from the responses in set B.
• The storage of word diverts automatic attention when it is heard again.