aftereffects of auditory adaptation Adaptation is a very robust feature of sensory processing: when a stimulus is displayed for a prolonged period, or repeatedly, the neural response to it will diminish. This process creates a local change in cortical sensitivity, which is behaviorally evident through worse sensory discrimination of subsequent stimuli which are similar to the adaptor stimulus, but better discrimination of dissimilar ones.

In the visual domain, there is also the concept of an afterimage. If one looks at a green patch for a long time, then a white wall will appear red. If one looks at a curved line for a long time, a straight line will appear to curve the other way. The landscape next to a waterfall will look like its traveling upwards, etc.

Does anything similar exist in the auditory domain? Can adaptation lead to illusory percepts in audition? And if not, why do you think this would be? 

I'm particularly interested in the neural level of explanation, and would be very happy to hear all speculations, however far out they are.
The most well known sensory after effect illusion in the auditory system is probably the Zwicker tone (Zwicker, 1964).


  If a white noise with a half‐octave‐band suppression placed anywhere from 300 to 7000 Hz is presented at an over‐all sound‐pressure level of about 60 dB for 1 min and then switched off, a decaying, poststimulatory sound similar to a pure tone is heard for about 10 sec. The pitch of the post‐stimulatory tone corresponds to a frequency within the suppressed band.


Norena and Eggermont (2003) argue that compared to non Zwicker tone stimuli, Zwicker tone stimuli give rise to an increased firing rate and an increase in the between neuron correlation of spike trains (I think) in the primary auditory cortex.