AUTHOR=Bidet-Caulet AurĂ©lie , Bertrand Olivier TITLE=Neurophysiological mechanisms involved in auditory perceptual organization JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroscience VOLUME=Volume 3 - 2009 YEAR=2009 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/neuro.01.025.2009 DOI=10.3389/neuro.01.025.2009 ISSN=1662-453X ABSTRACT=In our complex acoustic environment, we are confronted with a mixture of sounds produced by several simultaneous sources. However, we rarely perceive these sounds as incomprehensible noise. Our brain uses perceptual organization processes to independently follow the emission of each sound source over time. If the acoustic properties exploited in these processes are well-established, the neurophysiological mechanisms involved in auditory scene analysis have raised interest only recently. Here, we review the studies investigating these mechanisms using electrophysiological recordings from the cochlear nucleus to the auditory cortex, in animals and humans. Their findings reveal that basic mechanisms such as frequency selectivity, forward suppression and multi-second habituation shape the automatic brain responses to sounds in a way that can account for several important characteristics of perceptual organization of both simultaneous and successive sounds. One challenging question remains unresolved: how are the resulting activity patterns integrated to yield the corresponding conscious perceptsµ