In everyday environments, listeners face the challenge of parsing the sound mixture
reaching their ears into individual sources. Perceptual continuity of acoustic features, such
as pitch or location, has an obligatory effect on auditory attention even when a feature is not
task relevant. Cortical alpha oscillations (8-12 Hz) are thought to functionally inhibit the
processing of task-irrelevant information. Here, we hypothesize that discontinuities in a task-
irrelevant feature disrupt the attentional modulation of alpha rhythms. Using …