Although we cannot completely rule out any influence of FSDs and FEs, several factors reduce the likelihood that they can account for our results. First, the stimulus parameters used to study FSDs and FE are different from those used here. FSDs are most sensitive to shifts of about 7 %, and the smallest shift for which they have been studied is 3 % (Demany et al. 2009)—larger than any mistuning used in our experiment (see Table 1). FSDs and FE have both been studied only using inharmonic complexes, and we do not know how they would be affected by the perceptual fusion that occurs between harmonics (and near-harmonics) of a common fundamental frequency. Second, because FSDs do not lead to the “conscious perception” of the shifted component in the first sound presented (Demany and Ramos 2005), then, even if a FSD caused the mistuned component to “pop out” in the second interval of a test trial, it would not do so in the first interval. Given that subjects were instructed to focus on the residue pitch and that attempts to match the segregated component to the pitch of a fused harmonic complex in the first interval would be unsuccessful, it seems unlikely that subjects would—at least initially—adopt this strategy. Hence for this type of segregation to influence performance, it must be sufficiently salient to have a knock-on effect on subsequent test trials, perhaps by alerting subjects to the possibility of a segregated component and encouraging them to adopt an analytic listening strategy. This would in turn have to survive the presence of intervening context trials on which optimal performance should arise by combining information across harmonics and where the harmonicity and common onset and offset of the components should promote fusion. Indeed, the only physical aspect of the context stimuli that might promote segregation was that the “unreliable” harmonic (as well as three others) was replaced by a noise. As argued above, segregation of that harmonic would likely improve rather than degrade performance. Overall, then, we believe our results are most consistent with the idea that context effects observed here are likely—at least partly—due to a reduction of the contribution of a given harmonic to the residue pitch when it is experienced as non-informative in context trials.