Specificity of auditory implicit and explicit memory: is perceptual priming for environmental sounds exemplar specific?

Previous research (Stuart & Jones, 1995) has suggested that identification of environmental sounds may be mediated by abstract sound recognition units. This article reports the results of four repetition priming experiments that find evidence to the contrary. Participants attempted to identify environmental sounds from the initial sound stems (Experiments 1 and 2) or when the sounds were embedded in white noise (Experiments 3 and 4). Repetition of an identical exemplar sound led to more priming than did exposure to a different exemplar, provided that the perceptual difference between the two different exemplars was sufficiently large. Such an exemplar specificity effect was independent of the depth of prior encoding. A similar exemplar specificity effect was also found in explicit stem-cued recall (Experiments 1 and 2) and recognition (Experiment 3). Depth of encoding dissociated performance on tests of repetition priming and explicit memory. These results suggest that a significant amount of specific information is remembered, both implicitly and explicitly, to characterize individual exemplars of a sound category.