Echoic memory

It is sensory memory for auditory information. When people hear something, echoic memory makes an auditory image or recording of that sound and stores it briefly. Pure sounds can be held for brief intervals to help auditory perception

This recording called an echo. Echoes have a much longer duration than visual icons. Echoes last up to 2 seconds after ears stop hearing the sound.

Echoic memory is widely believed to play a role in language processing, perhaps to help retain exact replicas of sounds during sentence and word processing.

Researchers discovered that the length of echoic memory increases as children grow into adults.

The processing of information persisting as echoic memory is called ‘feature extraction’.

An important aspect of this kind of processing is that the auditory information being processed gets organized in a very basic way.
Echoic memory