Auditory streaming: Competition among alternative organizations

Abstract

It has been proposed that auditory stream splitting in rapid tone sequences occurs whenever a tone falls outside some critical region surrounding its predecessor and some tracking mechanism cannot shift its frequency setting fast enough. If this were true, a certain pair of tones would split apart or not, depending on their separation in time and frequency. Actually their splitting apart depends on the context of other tones. Alternative groupings compete for tonal elements. This was demonstrated using adult subjects who listened to a rapid repeating four-tone cycle and made three types of judgments: (1) discriminating the order of two of the tones, (2) saying whether two of the tones could be heard as a separate pair, and (3) judging the rhythmic pattern. It is proposed that stream formation is a pattern-factoring mechanism, sensitive to pattern properties. © 1978 Psychonomic Society, Inc.