Both transient storage of acoustic features and temporal integration of relevant signals are important for detecting,recognizing,and localizing sound sources in noisy,reverberant environments.At the early stage of auditory perception,fine-structure details of sound waves must be faithfully retained for a period of time,otherwise auditory processing at later stages would be impossible.In this talk,I will present our recent data to show that such an auditory "memory" is critical for listeners to perceptually integrate the sound wave from the source with reflections of the source in a reverberant room.Moreover,the perceptual integration of correlated sounds plays a role in releasing target speech from informational masking in a "cocktail party" situation.The difficulty experienced by older listeners in recognizing speech under the noisy,reverberant conditions is partially due to the reduced ability of retaining acoustic details.