The cocktail party problem requires listeners to infer individual sound sources from mixtures of sound. The problem can be solved only by leveraging regularities in natural sound sources, but little is known about how such regularities are internalized. We explored whether listeners learn source “schemas”—the abstract structure shared by different occurrences of the same type of sound source—and use them to infer sources from mixtures. We measured the ability of listeners to segregate mixtures of time-varying sources. In each experiment a subset of trials contained schema-based sources generated from a common template by transformations (transposition and time dilation) that introduced acoustic variation but preserved abstract structure. Across several tasks and classes of sound sources, schema-based sources consistently aided source separation, in some cases producing rapid improvements in performance over the first few exposures to a schema. Learning persisted across blocks that did not contain the learned schema, and listeners were able to learn and use multiple schemas simultaneously. No learning was evident when schema were presented in the task-irrelevant (i.e., distractor) source. However, learning from task-relevant stimuli showed signs of being implicit, in that listeners were no more likely to report that sources recurred in experiments containing schema-based sources than in control experiments containing no schema-based sources. The results implicate a mechanism for rapidly internalizing abstract sound structure, facilitating accurate perceptual organization of sound sources that recur in the environment.

鸡尾酒会问题要求听众从混合声音中推断出各个声音源。只能通过利用自然声源中的规律性来解决该问题，但是对于这种规律性如何内部化知之甚少。我们探讨了听众是否学习源“模式”（同一类型的声源的不同事件所共享的抽象结构），并使用它们从混合中推断出源。我们测量了听众分离时变源混合的能力。在每个实验中，试验的子集包含通过转换（换位和时间扩张）从通用模板生成的基于模式的源，这些转换引入了声学变化但保留了抽象结构。在多种任务和各种声源类别中，基于模式的声源始终有助于声源分离，在某些情况下，与方案的前几次暴露相比，可以快速提高性能。学习持续跨越不包含所学架构的模块，并且侦听器能够同时学习和使用多个架构。当在与任务无关（即，干扰因素）的源代码中出现模式时，没有学习是显而易见的。但是，从与任务相关的刺激中学习表明存在隐含的迹象，因为与不包含基于模式的源的对照实验相比，侦听器不太可能报告包含基于模式的源的实验中重复出现的源。结果暗示了一种机制，该机制可快速内部化抽象声音结构，从而有助于对在环境中重复出现的声源进行准确的感知组织。