Auditory perception of spatiotemporal patterns

To test the tendency of subjects to perceptually organize discrete temporal patterns with regard to runs of identical stimulus events, spatiotemporal patterns of white noise were presented for reproduction. The subjects in Experiment I began their reproductions with the true starting points of the patterns, but the subjects in Experiment II, who could not perceive the true starting points, began their reproductions with either long or short runs. It is suggested that changes in runs of auditory patterns are perceptually analogous to changes in contours of visual patterns.