What illusions tell us about silence

Silence Illusions and Auditory Perception

The researchers used three silence-based illusions to study the perception of silence. The first illusion, called the 'one silence is more illusion,' fooled subjects into perceiving a continuous silence as longer than two discrete silences of the same duration. In the second illusion, the 'silence-based warping illusion,' two tones played within a silence event were perceived as farther apart in time compared to the same tones against silence. The third illusion, the 'oddball silence illusion,' demonstrated that different kinds of silence can be perceived differently. These experiments highlight that our auditory system treats silences as it treats sounds, challenging the conventional understanding of perception.