BACKGROUND The auditory continuity illusion or the perceptual restoration of a target sound briefly interrupted by an extraneous sound has been shown to depend on masking. However, little is known about factors other than masking. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We examined whether a sequence of flanking transient sounds affects the apparent continuity of a target tone alternated with a bandpa...

In most natural listening environments, noise occludes objects of interest, and it would be beneficial for an organism to correctly identify those objects. When a sound of interest ("foreground" sound) is interrupted by a loud noise, subjects perceive the entire sound, even if the noise was intense enough to completely mask a part of it. This phenomenon can be exploited to create an illusion: w...

Internship presented me with countless opportunities to worry. The spectrum of concern varied widely, but rest assured there was always something for me to lose sleep about. Looking back, it was often a rather simple question, involving medication doses or routes of administration, but to a newly minted medical graduate everything feels substantial. Of all the dilemmas I faced though, these med...