The relationship between perceived pleasantness and memory for environmental sounds

The everyday auditory environment contains many sounds that can be influenced by semantic information and listener experiences. Some sounds are more memorable than others and there is limited work examining the role of specific semantic or subjective attributes on retrieval success for environmental sounds. The present study examines the relationship between pleasantness ratings and memory performance on a cued-recall task. A group of listeners were presented with 36 environmental sounds and asked to rate each for perceived pleasantness to provide baseline evaluations for each sound. Based on the ratings, stimuli were sorted into two pleasantness-balanced groups. A second group of listeners evaluated half of the stimuli for pleasantness during the “study” phase, which was followed by a cued recall test. At test, half of the items were “old” (from the study phase), and half were “new” (from the set of 36 sounds). The results demonstrate that listener’s recalled more pleasant sounds more accurately than unpleasant sounds. Further, listeners produced more false alarms for the more pleasant sounds. These results suggest that listeners are biased to report recalling more pleasant sound regardless if they had been heard previously.