P22Session 2 (Tuesday 13 January 2026, 14:10-16:40)Remembering spoken information: how noise impacts listeners’ content and source memory
Our ability to understand and remember information from spoken conversations in acoustically complex listening conditions is crucial for everyday communication. Oftentimes, we are required to recall both the content (“what was said?”) and the source (“who said it?”). To systematically study how challenging listening conditions impact content and source memory, we adapted the Heard Text Recall (HTR) paradigm (Schlittmeier et al., 2023, doi:10.18154/RWTH-2023-05285). The HTR assesses comprehension and memory for spoken text based on short passages followed by open-ended content questions. In the present study, we added talker-related questions to this procedure, resulting in the HTR-TR version. This study employed the HTR-TR paradigm to explore how stationary background noise impacts listeners’ ability to remember both conversational content and its corresponding talker. In an audio-only experiment, participants listened to short conversational passages from two spatially separated talkers (±60° azimuth) under quiet and pink noise (-3 dB SNR) conditions. We hypothesized that pink noise would impair content memory and, particularly, source recall, reflecting the increased cognitive demands of integrating both types of information. Results will be presented and discussed in terms of their relevance for studying speech-in-noise memory, with a focus on methodological enhancements and future applications of the HTR-TR paradigm in auditory cognition research.