Competition among auditory streaming, dichotic fusion, and diotic fusion.

When a component of a complex tone is captured into a stream by other events that precede and follow it, it does not fuse with the other components of the complex tone but tends to to be heard as a separate event. The current study examined the ability of elements of a stream to resist becoming fused with other synchronous events, heard either in the same ear or at the opposite ear. The general finding was that events in one ear fuse strongly with elements of an auditory stream in the other ear only when they are spectrally very similar. In this case, the fusion of simultaneous components at opposite ears is stronger than of simultaneous components heard in the same ear. However, when the spectra of the synchronous events are mismatched even slightly, components in the same ear fuse more strongly than components at opposite ears. These results are accounted for by a theory that assumes that decisions that perceptually integrate sequential events, synchronous events, and events at opposite ears are interdependent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]