Experiment 2. Schematic depictions of the stimuli in the five different conditions. In each panel, the gray bars indicate the intensity of the target component (i.e., the temporal part of the stimulus that was varied in intensity), while the beige areas indicate the level of the constant part of the stimulus that had the same sound level/brightness in both intervals of a given trial. In this example, the target intensity is sampled from the distribution with higher mean (indicated by the gray horizontal line) in interval 2 and from the distribution with lower mean in interval 1. Panel A: target component onset at 0 ms, corresponding to the first temporal component in the time-varying stimuli in Experiment 1. Panel B: target component onset at 117.65 ms, corresponding to the second temporal component in Experiment 1. Panel C: target component onset at 470.59 ms, corresponding to the fifth temporal component in Experiment 1. Panel D: target component onset at 1058.82 ms, corresponding to the final (10th) temporal component in Experiment 1. Panel E: target component presented in isolation, without a surrounding constant-intensity stimulus part.