Subject: Re: By any other name... From: Daniel Pressnitzer <Daniel.Pressnitzer@xxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 16:58:48 +0100 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>Dear Bruno, I think that the interrupting sound has to provide energy in the same receptors as the interrupted one, for the illusion to occur, but that many other aspects of the response they produce can be vastly different. In this respect, the signal is really absent during the illusion. For instance, a noise burst will provide energy in the frequency channels tuned to a pure tone, but the time-intervals within those channels will differ (for those of us who believe in these sort of things...). What the noise is doing, I think, is not replacing the signal but rather making the overall neural pattern consistent with a 'signal masked by noise' hypothesis. Another example are illusions produced by time-varying stimuli, like frequency- or amplitude-modulated ones. Would one say that the noise contains the modulation somehow? Cheers, Daniel