The nonlinear effect of temporal proximity in auditory stream construction

What is it about?

One important cue for parsing the mixture of sounds arriving to the ears into coherent sequences (e.g. speech of my friend + background music + radio) is the temporal separation between consecutive sounds. It has been previously established that at short inter-sound intervals, spectrally similar sounds are likely to be grouped together, whereas dissimilar sounds are segregated into separate sound streams. However, a systematic testing of very short inter-sound intervals was missing from the literature. We found that below ~60 ms inter-sound interval, consecutive sounds are predominantly grouped together. Furthermore, our results indicate that one’s ability to judge the order of two sounds is related to how well one can separate concurrent sound streams.

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Why is it important?

These results extend our knowledge about the role of temporal proximity in auditory source separation. The study also stresses the relevance of individual differences in temporal discrimination ability.