The question of the use of analytical versus holistic listening strategies when judging the pitch of a complex tone with a mistuned component is not specific to the “discrimination paradigm” used here but has been discussed before in the context of pitch matching paradigms (Gockel et al. 2005b, 2009). However, in the studies of Gockel et al. (2005b, 2009) and Darwin and Ciocca (1992), the mistuned component was presented asynchronously with the remainder of the complex and therefore could always be heard as a separate tone, while in the present study, all components started and stopped together, thus reducing the cues for perceptual segregation. To avoid the possibility that listeners use an analytical listening strategy and compare the individual mistuned component with the corresponding harmonic in the first interval, ideally the two complexes would have no harmonics in common in the two intervals. However, Moore and Glasberg (1990) showed that the differences in timbre between complex tones with no harmonics in common markedly impaired pitch discrimination. Therefore, this approach would have been unsuitable for the present research question, as pitch shifts due to mistuning of a single harmonic are small in comparison to the difference limens for F0 measured for complex tones with no harmonics in common (Moore et al. 1985; Moore and Glasberg 1990). Instead, the present experiment was designed so as to prevent the perceptual segregation of the target component from the remaining components and thus make it less likely that the mistuned component was compared with the corresponding harmonic component. To achieve this, first, in the context trials, listeners needed to “tune in” to the F0 to perform the task optimally, and reliable and informative cues for the task were conveyed only by those harmonics that were not replaced by noise bands. As noted in Results Sect, the superior performance in the context trials compared to the test trials suggests that subjects were at least combining information across harmonics in the context trials, even though the data do not prove that by doing so they were calculating a residue pitch. Second, in the test trials, the first interval always contained the harmonic complex tone; the mistuned harmonic that might pop out to a certain degree (Moore et al. 1986) only appeared in the second interval. Third, the amount of mistuning employed was small. Moore et al. (1986) measured thresholds for hearing out an individual mistuned harmonic as a separate tone from the remainder of the complex. For a 420-ms 200-Hz F0 complex tone, the amount of mistuning required was on average 1.3 and 1.8 % for the third and the fourth harmonics, respectively. For shorter durations, thresholds increased. In the present experiment, the tone duration was 200 ms and the amount of mistuning employed (see Table 1) in most cases was below the thresholds determined by Moore et al. (1986). Also note that listeners 6 and 7, for whom the amount of mistuning employed here was smallest (0.3–0.6 %), showed the same effect of context reliability as was visible in the mean results.