MUN Psychology - Faculty


Aimee Surprenant

My main area of research explores the intersection of auditory perception and memory. A long-standing assumption of both perception and memory researchers has been that, if a person can correctly identify a stimulus then any memory failures must be due to higher-level cognitive factors. Thus, distortion of the signal by noise, filtering, vision or hearing loss should have no direct effect on the comprehension of and memory for those materials. However, we find that there is a link between auditory speech processing and the amount of disruption that irrelevant background noise causes in memory tasks for auditory as well as visual to-be-remembered stimuli. Contrary to the standard view, it seems that noise and distortion interfere with memory for those sounds, even at levels that do not interfere with identification. The practical impact of this finding is that listeners with only mild hearing loss may have a peripheral or sensory reason for reduced cognitive functioning. This hypothesis has implications for areas like cognitive aging that have concentrated on finding higher-level, cognitive mechanisms that are impaired with age. My work suggests that even when identification is unimpaired, mild hearing loss can have an effect on behavior. Along with the practical implications of this work, two different theoretical explanations of this basic effect, degradation in a sensory representation and reduced capacity, are both found to contribute substantially to this effect.

Surprenant, A. M., Neath, I., & Brown, G. D. A. (in press). Modeling age-related differences in immediate memory using SIMPLE. Journal of Memory and Language.

Farley, L. A., Neath, I., Allbritton, D. W., & Surprenant, A. M. (in press). Irrelevant speech effects and sequence learning. Memory & Cognition.

Bireta, T. J., Neath, I., & Surprenant, A. M. (in press). The syllable based word length effect and stimulus set specificity. Psychological Bulletin & Review.

Surprenant, A. M. (accepted 29 September, 2005). Effects of noise on identification and serial recall of nonsense syllables in older and younger adults. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition.

Hulme, C., Neath, I., Stuart, G., Shostak, L., Surprenant, A. M., & Brown, G. D. A. (2006). The distinctiveness of the word-length effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 32, 586-594

Surprenant, A. M., Kelley, M. R., Farley, L. A., & Neath, I. (2005). Fill-in and infill errors in order memory. Memory, 13, 267-273.

Hulme, C., Surprenant, A. M, Bireta T. J., Stuart, G., & Neath, I. (2004). Abolishing the word-length effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 98–106.

Neath, I., Bireta, T. J., & Surprenant, A. M. (2003). The time-based word length effect and stimulus set specificity. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 10, 430-434.

Neath, I., Farley, L. A., & Surprenant, A. M. (2003). Directly assessing the relationship between irrelevant speech and articulatory suppression. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 56A, 1269-1278.

Hastings, A., Lee, H. H., Davies, P., & Surprenant, A. M. (2003). Measurement of the attributes of complex tonal components commonly found in product sound. Noise Control Engineering Journal, 51, 195-212.

Books

Surprenant, A. M., Francis, G., & Neath, I. (2005). CogLab Reader. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Neath, I., & Surprenant, A. M. (2003). Human Memory, Second Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Roediger, H. L. III, Nairne, J. S., Neath, I., & Surprenant, A. M. (Eds.) (2001). The nature of remembering: Essays in honor of Robert G. Crowder. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Book chapters

Surprenant, A. M., & Neath, I. (in press). Age-related differences in working memory. In N. Osaka, R. Logie, and M. D’Esposito (Eds.), Working memory: Behavioural and neural correlates. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Surprenant, A. M., & Neath, I. (in press). The 9 lives of short-term memory. To appear in A. S. C. Thorn and M. Page (Eds.), Interactions between short-term and long-term memory in the verbal domain. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Surprenant, A. M., Bireta, T. J., & Farley, L. A. (in press). A brief history of memory and aging. In J. S. Nairne (Ed.), The foundations of remembering: Essays in honor of Henry L. Roediger, III. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Surprenant, A. M., & Neath, I. (in press). Cognitive Aging. In J. M. Wilmouth, and K. F. Ferraro, (Eds.), Gerontology: Perspectives and issues, 3rd Edition. New York: Springer Publishing Company.

Neath, I., & Surprenant, A. M. (2005). Mechanisms of memory. In K. Lamberts & R. L. Goldstone (Eds.), Handbook of cognition, pp. 221-238. London: Sage.