Humans routinely segregate a complex acoustic scene into different auditory streams, through the extraction of bottom-up perceptual cues and the use of top-down selective attention. To determine the neural mechanisms underlying this process, neural responses obtained through magnetoencephalography (MEG) were correlated with behavioral performance in the context of an informational masking parad...

Perceptual segregation of multiple, simultaneous auditory streams has been becoming an area of interest to several investigators since the publication of Bregman’s (1991) landmark book on the subject. The principal motivation behind these investigations has been to find a closure on the classic, and invariably elusive, problem of the auditory segregation of simultaneous speech signals, i.e., th...

The goal of this study was to examine the claim that amodal deficits in attentional shifting may be the source of reading acquisition disorders in phonological developmental dyslexia (sluggish attentional shifting, SAS, theory, Hari & Renvall, 2001). We investigated automatic attentional shifting in the auditory and visual modalities in 13 dyslexic young adults with a phonological awareness def...

One hypothesis concerning the neural underpinnings of auditory streaming states that frequency tuning of tonotopically organized neurons in primary auditory fields in combination with physiological forward suppression is necessary for the separation of representations of high-frequency A and low-frequency B tones. The extent of spatial overlap between the tonotopic activations of A and B tones ...

Polyphonic music listening well exemplifies processes typically involved in daily auditory scene analysis situations, relying on an interactive interplay between bottom-up and top-down processes. Most studies investigating scene analysis have used elementary auditory scenes, however real-world scene analysis is far more complex. In particular, music, contrary to most other natural auditory scen...

The evidence that cochlear implant listeners routinely experience stream segregation is limited and equivocal. Streaming in these listeners was explored using tone sequences matched to the center frequencies of the implant's 22 electrodes. Experiment 1 measured temporal discrimination for short (ABA triplet) and longer (12 AB cycles) sequences (tone/silence durations = 60/40 ms). Tone A stimula...

Auditory figure-ground segregation, listeners' ability to selectively hear out a sound of interest from a background of competing sounds, is a fundamental aspect of scene analysis. In contrast to the disordered acoustic environment we experience during everyday listening, most studies of auditory segregation have used relatively simple, temporally regular signals. We developed a new figure-grou...

When a mixture of sound from many sources arrives at the ear, the auditory system attempts to segregate it into different perceptual streams. For sequences of sounds, the effects of basic acoustic properties (e.g., frequency separation, rate) on streaming are well understood, but much less is known about the effects of more complex acoustic attributes. Dynamic variations in frequency spectrum a...

Streaming is a perceptual mechanism by which the brain segregates information from multiple sound sources in our environment and assigns them to distinct auditory streams. Examples for streaming cues are differences in frequency spectrum, pitch, or space, and potential neural correlates for streaming based on spectral and pitch cues have been identified in the auditory cortex. Here, magnetoence...