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Hear, Hear

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Stephanie
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When you’re going about your daily life, your brain has to perceive things, attend to them, decide what to do about them, and respond to them. Distractions can interrupt at any moment. Hear, Hear, from BrainHQ’s Memory category, is designed to train your ability to ignore distractions during the perceiving and attending stages by exercising your sensory discrimination skills.

Sensory discrimination is what we use when we listen to the person we’re talking to but filter out other voices in a crowded place, or when we are watching a movie and we are able to watch it without hearing the annoying sounds of people munching on popcorn. Our brains discriminate between the sounds upon which we want to focus and those we want to ignore.

In Hear, Hear, you are asked to remember a target sound and determine whether a set of similar sounds presented contain the target sound.

Here's how the exercise works:

  1. A speaker icon will appear on screen to indicate that the target sound is being played. Remember this sound. After the sound stops you’ll be able to replay the sound or move on to the level. Select “Next” when ready.
    An animation from Hear Hear. Text at the top of the screen reads Remember the sound you hear. Below that a speaker icon with sound waves emitting from it indicates a sound should be playing. After the sound stops, the sspeaker disappears and two buttons appear: play again, and next.
  2. A speaker icon will appear on screen to indicate sounds are being played. Determine which of these sounds is the target sound.
    A screenshot from Hear Hear. Text on the screen reads Listen for the sound you remembered. A speaker icon is in the middle of the screen, and a callout bubble indicates that three beeps were played.
  3. After the sounds have stopped, buttons will appear on screen that correspond with the previous sounds. Select the button of the sound that best matches your target sound.
    A screenshot from Hear Hear. There are three buttons on screen. From left to right, the buttons read First, Second, Third.

If an incorrect answer is given, you’ll hear a “bonk” sound and the sounds in the following turns may be more distinct. If a correct answer is given, you’ll hear a “boop” sound and the sounds in the following turns may become more similar. In both cases, the level then continues, repeating from Step 2 above (you’ll have to remember the target sound from Step 1 for the duration of the level).

You can review the exercise video tutorial below:

Hear, Hear from BrainHQ from Posit Science on Vimeo.

As you progress through Hear, Hear, it becomes more challenging in these ways:

  • Sometimes the sounds are beeps (a single frequency) and other times the sounds are sweeps (a set of frequencies)
  • The sounds become shorter and closer together
  • The sounds become more similar to each other

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