The role of sensitivity to transients in the detection of appearing and disappearing objects in complex acoustic scenes.

We report a series of psychophysics experiments that investigated listeners' sensitivity to changes in complex acoustic scenes. Specifically, we sought to test the hypothesis that change detection is supported by sensitivity to change-related transients (an abrupt change in stimulus power within a certain frequency band, associated with the appearance or disappearance of a scene element). This hypothesis, in the context of natural scenes, is commonly dismissed on account that the elements of the scene may themselves be characterized by on-going energy fluctuations that would mask any genuine change-related transients.