Adult listeners rated the difficulty of hearing a single coherent stream in a sequence of high (H) and low (L) tones that alternated in a repetitive galloping pattern (HLH-HLH-HLH...). They could hear the gallop when the sequence was perceived as a single stream, but when it segregated into two substreams, they heard H-H- ... in one stream and L-L- ... in the other. The onset-to-onset time of t...

When presented with alternating low and high tones, listeners are more likely to perceive 2 separate streams of tones ("streaming") than a single coherent stream when the frequency separation (Deltaf) between tones is greater and the number of tone presentations is greater ("buildup"). However, the same large-Deltaf sequence reduces streaming for subsequent patterns presented after a gap of up ...

Two experiments were performed to examine the effect of stimulus intensity on VISS (visual stream segregation) which is a kind of beta movement first described by Bregman and Achim (1973). Six subjects were required to find the upper threshold of ISI for producing VISS under various conditions of the stimulus intensity in each experiment. The ISI threshold decreased as the stimulus intensity wa...

Two pairs of experiments studied the effects of attention and of unilateral neglect on auditory streaming. The first pair showed that the build up of auditory streaming in normal participants is greatly reduced or absent when they attend to a competing task in the contralateral ear. It was concluded that the effective build up of streaming depends on attention. The second pair showed that patie...

Segregating streams of sounds from sources in complex acoustic scenes is crucial for perception in real world situations. We analyzed an objective psychophysical measure of stream segregation obtained while simultaneously recording forebrain neurons in the European starlings to investigate neural correlates of segregating a stream of A tones from a stream of B tones presented at one-half the ra...