Auditory memory for temporal characteristics of sound

This study evaluates auditory memory for variations in the rate of sinusoidal amplitude modulation (SAM) of noise bursts in the European starling (Sturnus vulgaris). To estimate the extent of the starling’s auditory short-term memory store, a delayed non-matching-to-sample paradigm was applied. The birds were trained to discriminate between a series of identical “sample stimuli” and a single “test stimulus”. The birds classified SAM rates of sample and test stimuli as being either the same or different. Memory performance of the birds was measured as the percentage of correct classifications. Auditory memory persistence time was estimated as a function of the delay between sample and test stimuli. Memory performance was significantly affected by the delay between sample and test and by the number of sample stimuli presented before the test stimulus, but was not affected by the difference in SAM rate between sample and test stimuli. The individuals’ auditory memory persistence times varied between 2 and 13 s. The starlings’ auditory memory persistence in the present study for signals varying in the temporal domain was significantly shorter compared to that of a previous study (Zokoll et al. in J Acoust Soc Am 121:2842, 2007) applying tonal stimuli varying in the spectral domain.