Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands.
J Neurosci. 2012 Mar 28;32(13):4660-4. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.6261-11.2012.
When an acoustic signal is temporarily interrupted by another sound, it is sometimes heard as continuing through, even when the signal is actually turned off during the interruption-an effect known as the "auditory continuity illusion." A widespread view is that the illusion can only occur when peripheral neural responses contain no evidence that the signal was interrupted. Here we challenge this view using a combination of psychophysical measures from human listeners and computational simulations with a model of the auditory periphery. The results reveal that the illusion seems to depend more on the overall specific loudness than on the peripheral masking properties of the interrupting sound. This finding indicates that the continuity illusion is determined by the global features, rather than the fine-grained temporal structure, of the interrupting sound, and argues against the view that the illusion arises in the auditory periphery.
当一个声学信号被另一个声音暂时打断时，它有时会被听到继续存在，即使在中断期间信号实际上已经关闭——这种效应被称为“听觉连续性错觉”。一种广泛的观点认为，只有在外周神经反应中没有信号中断的证据时，这种错觉才会发生。在这里，我们使用来自人类听众的心理物理测量和听觉外围模型的计算模拟相结合来挑战这一观点。结果表明，错觉似乎更依赖于整体特定响度，而不是中断声音的外围掩蔽特性。这一发现表明，连续性错觉是由中断声音的全局特征决定的，而不是由中断声音的精细时间结构决定的，这与错觉产生于听觉外围的观点相悖。
