Illusory discontinuity

Illusory discontinuity is an auditory illusion in which a continuous ongoing sound becomes inaudible during a brief, non-masking noise.

Longer sounds elicit weaker illusory discontinuity; this effect may be related to better auditory segregation.

The illusion is likely to be a novel form of informational masking (broadly defined as a degradation of auditory detection or discrimination of a signal embedded in a context of other similar sounds).

It has been suggested that illusory discontinuity is related to inability to segregate the ongoing sound from the interrupting noise,[2] although more research is needed to prove this.

[1] This suggests that the individual variability in perceiving discontinuity illusion is related to neural processing of the interrupting sound.