The auditory system continuously parses the acoustic environment into auditory objects, usually representing separate sound sources. Sound sources typically show characteristic emission patterns. These regular temporal sound patterns are possible cues for distinguishing sound sources. The present study was designed to test whether regular patterns are used as cues for source distinction and to specify the role that detecting these regularities may play in the process of auditory stream segregation. Participants were presented with tone sequences, and they were asked to continuously indicate whether they perceived the tones in terms of a single coherent sequence of sounds (integrated) or as two concurrent sound streams (segregated). Unknown to the participant, in some stimulus conditions, regular patterns were present in one or both putative streams. In all stimulus conditions, participants' perception switched back and forth between the two sound organizations. Importantly, regular patterns occurring in either one or both streams prolonged the mean duration of two-stream percepts, whereas the duration of one-stream percepts was unaffected. These results suggest that temporal regularities are utilized in auditory scene analysis. It appears that the role of this cue lies in stabilizing streams once they have been formed on the basis of simpler acoustic cues.

The auditory two-tone streaming paradigm has been used extensively to study the mechanisms that underlie the decomposition of the auditory input into coherent sound sequences. Using longer tone sequences than usual in the literature, we show that listeners hold their first percept of the sound sequence for a relatively long period, after which perception switches between two or more alternative sound organizations, each held on average for a much shorter duration. The first percept also differs from subsequent ones in that stimulus parameters influence its quality and duration to a far greater degree than the subsequent ones. We propose an account of auditory streaming in terms of rivalry between competing temporal associations based on two sets of processes. The formation of associations (discovery of alternative interpretations) mainly affects the first percept by determining which sound group is discovered first and how long it takes for alternative groups to be established. In contrast, subsequent percepts arise from stochastic switching between the alternatives, the dynamics of which are determined by competitive interactions between the set of coexisting interpretations.

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Although sensory systems share the common goal of building accurate representations of the environment, differences in the physical nature of stimuli from different modalities seem to argue against similar processing strategies. Nevertheless, our experiments have revealed surprisingly deep parallels between the dynamics of perceptual organisation in auditory streaming and binocular rivalry. These parallels provide evidence for an interpretation of auditory streaming in terms of rivalry between competing temporal associations, which helps to explain the distribution of perceptual switching with respect to stimulus features, strong differences between first and steady-state phases in ongoing switching, the nonmonotonic dependence of switching rate on stimulus “strength,” the range of relationships between phase duration and stimulus features, and the existence and distribution of “transition” phases during which subjects simultaneously experience what are usually thought to be mutually exclusive perceptual states.