title: A Detection-Theoretic Analysis of Auditory Streaming and Its Relation to Auditory Masking.
abstract: Research on hearing has long been challenged with understanding our exceptional ability to hear out individual sounds in a mixture (the so-called cocktail party problem). Two general approaches to the problem have been taken using sequences of tones as stimuli. The first has focused on our tendency to hear sequences, sufficiently separated in frequency, split into separate cohesive streams (auditory streaming). The second has focused on our ability to detect a change in one sequence, ignoring all others (auditory masking). The two phenomena are clearly related, but that relation has never been evaluated analytically. This article offers a detection-theoretic analysis of the relation between multitone streaming and masking that underscores the expected similarities and differences between these phenomena and the predicted outcome of experiments in each case. The key to establishing this relation is the function linking performance to the information divergence of the tone sequences, DKL (a measure of the statistical separation of their parameters). A strong prediction is that streaming and masking of tones will be a common function of DKL provided that the statistical properties of sequences are symmetric. Results of experiments are reported supporting this prediction.
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI, USA.
authors.forename: An-Chieh
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Chang
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI, USA robert.lutfi@wisc.edu.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lutfi
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI, USA.
authors.forename: Jungmee
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI, USA.
authors.forename: Inseok
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Heo
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001307:Auditory Perception; D006309:Hearing; D006801:Humans; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D013016:Sound; D013997:Time Factors
keywords: auditory masking; auditory perception; auditory streaming; hearing