For nor­mal-hear­ing humans, cat­e­go­riz­ing com­plex acoustic stim­uli is a seem­ing­ly effort­less process, even if one has nev­er heard the par­tic­u­lar sounds before. Nev­er­the­less, pri­or expe­ri­ence with spe­cif­ic cor­re­la­tions between acoustic stim­u­lus prop­er­ties affects the cat­e­go­riza­tion in a ben­e­fi­cial way, as we show in our paper:

Pri­or expe­ri­ence with neg­a­tive spec­tral cor­re­la­tions pro­motes infor­ma­tion inte­gra­tion dur­ing audi­to­ry cat­e­go­ry learning

(by Math­ias Scharinger, Mol­ly Hen­ry, and Jonas Obleser).

The arti­cle is in press at Mem­o­ry & Cog­ni­tion (avail­able online). Our main find­ing is that stim­uli dif­fer­ing in the loca­tion of two spec­tral peaks were bet­ter cat­e­go­rized if there was a neg­a­tive cor­re­la­tion between the two spec­tral peaks than if there was a pos­i­tive cor­re­la­tion. Since neg­a­tive spec­tral cor­re­la­tions char­ac­ter­ize pho­net­ic speech prop­er­ties, our find­ings sug­gest that short-term audi­to­ry cat­e­go­ry learn­ing is influ­enced by long-term rep­re­sen­ta­tions of abstract acoustic-pho­net­ic prop­er­ties (here: spec­tral correlations).