Yuka kashino biography of william

Introduction

Most sound sources of interest in the world around us emit sequences of sound events, e.g., the notes in a birdsong or the words spoken in conversation. These sounds are seldom present in isolation and typical sound events consist of many time-varying components. The problem for auditory perception is to parse this complex scene, and to do so in a timely manner that allows us to interact appropriately with the sound emitting objects of interest. The problem of grouping, both the simultaneously present components that belong to the same sound event, and the sequential associations between events emitted by the same source, is known as auditory scene analysis (Bregman, 1990). Understanding this seemingly effortless process of perceptual organization is an essential step toward explaining what determines our conscious perceptions of the world. Most of the studies in this field to date have focused on trying to identify the general processing strategies used by the human brain for parsing the auditory scene. In doing so, inter-individual differences have typically been treated as a source of noise in the experimental data, as is the case in many cognitiv