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. 2017 Sep;104:144–156. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.08.009

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

Procedure for creating auditory scene congruity tests. The diagram summarises the key steps we followed in preparing the auditory semantic and emotional congruity tests in the main experiment. An initial search of sound libraries (bottom panel; listed in Supplementary Material on-line) identified 62 sounds drawn from the broad categories of human and animal vocalisations, natural environmental noises and artificial noises (machinery and tools), of which a subset of nine sounds are represented pictorially here (from left to right, dentist's drill, splashing water, baby laughing, lion, alarm clock, grandfather clock, pig, bird chirping, snoring). These sounds were superimposed digitally as pairs into scenes (see Supplementary Material on-line) with fixed duration and average loudness. In the pilot experiment (middle panel; details in Supplementary Material on-line), the 62 constituent sounds individually were assessed for identifiability and pleasantness; and 193 sound scenes (composed from paired sounds) were assessed for likelihood and pleasantness of the combination. Auditory scene stimuli in the final semantic and emotional congruity tests (top panels; 30 trials in semantic congruity test, 40 trials in emotional congruity test) comprised the following conditions: ScEc, semantically congruous, emotionally congruous; ScEi, semantically congruous, emotionally incongruous; SiEc, semantically incongruous, emotionally congruous; SiEi, semantically incongruous, emotionally incongruous (here, semantic relatedness is coded using sound icon shape and emotional relatedness using sound icon shading). These final scene stimuli met inclusion criteria established from the pilot data (details in Supplementary Material on-line): all individual constituent sounds met a consensus identifiability criterion and in addition, scenes in the final semantic congruity test met condition-specific likelihood criteria while scenes in the final emotional congruity test met condition-specific pleasantness criteria. For each test, the ‘nuisance’ congruity parameter (emotional congruity in the semantic congruity test; semantic congruity in the emotional congruity test) was also controlled within a narrow range across conditions.