Workshop on the Auditory Basis of Speech Perception Keele University, UK July 15-19, 1996

Auditory Temporal Acuity and the Perceptual Organization of Complex Sounds

C. Formby (1), L. P. Sherlock (1), S. Li (2)

(1) Department of Surgery, Division of Otolaryngology-HNS, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA
(2) AT&T Bell Laboratories, Middletown, NJ, USA

A variation on a seemingly routine experiment, with an obvious outcome, is described that yields a set of findings which challenges our current understanding of auditory temporal perception and theory. The unexpected results reveal that detection threshold for a silent temporal gap may increase by an order of magnitude depending upon the number, temporal position, and frequency relations of the components that mark the gap. These results, which are not intuitive and cannot be predicted with existing models, provide a novel perspective on the intricacies of auditory temporal processing and the perceptual organization of complex sounds.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Formby, C. / Sherlock, L. P. / Li, S. (1996): "Auditory temporal acuity and the perceptual organization of complex sounds", In ABSP-1996, 137-140.