Auditory continuity and amplitude edges

Abstract

The present experiments investigated the illu-sion of a soft tone sounding continuous when it was actually alternating with a burst of louder noise. It was found that brief changes in the amplitude of the tones, introduced before and after the noise burst, reduced the illusion of continuity; this reduction was greater when the amplitude decreased rather than increased be-fore the noise. The results suggest that lack of 'edge information ' is implicated in the illusion of continuity. Perceived auditory continuity has recently been investigated by a number of research-ers. This in an illusion in which an inter-rupted, softer sound, such as a tone, is per-ceived as continuous when a louder sound, such as a noise burst, fills in the missing spaces. The approach taken by most of the researchers has been to try to explain this effect by a relatively simple persistence of the neural activity related to the softer sound, which is assumed to be the result of some facilitation by the neural activation associated with the louder interruptin