In the visual domain, Marsolek and colleagues have found evidence for two dissociable and parallel neural subsystems underlying object recognition: an abstractcategory subsystem that operates more effectively in the LH and is less sensitive to specific surface characteristics of the stimuli, and a specific-exemplar subsystem that operates more effectively in the RH and is more sensitive to specific stimulus characteristics. In the present study, we tested this hypothesis in the auditory domain

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... y conducting two long-term repetition-priming experiments on the recognition of environmental sounds. Participants attempted to identify target sounds from an initial 750 ms sound stem presented monaurally. Target stems were primed by either an identical or a different exemplar sound (e.g., the same or different tokens of an accordion). In Exp. 2 white noise was simultaneously administered to the opposite ear. In both experiments, we obtained an exemplar-specificity effect when sounds were presented to the left ear (RH), but not when sounds were presented to the right ear (LH), consistent with Marsolek's framework.