doi: 10.3389/fnins.2014.00293 Probing auditory scene analysis

In natural environments, the auditory system is typically con-fronted with amixture of sounds originating from different sound sources. The sounds emanating from different sources can over-lap each other in time and feature space. Thus, the auditory system has to continuously decompose competing sounds into distinct meaningful auditory objects or “auditory streams ” asso-ciated with the possible sound sources. This decomposition of the sounds, termed “Auditory scene analysis ” (ASA) by Bregman (1990), involves two kinds of grouping. Grouping based on simul-taneous cues (e.g., harmonicity) and on sequential cues (e.g., similarity of acoustic features over time). Understanding how the brain solves these tasks is a fundamental challenge facing audi-tory scientists. In recent years, the topic of ASA was broadly investigated in different fields of auditory research using a wide range of methods, including studies in different species (Huls