Objectives: animals with induced tinnitus showed difficulties in detect- ing silent gaps in sounds, suggesting that the tinnitus percept may be filling the gap. the main purpose of this study was to evaluate the appli- cability of this approach to detect tinnitus in human patients. the authors first hypothesized that gap detection would be impaired in patients with tinnitus, and second, that gap detection would be more impaired at fre- quencies close to the tinnitus frequency of the patient. design: twenty-two adults with bilateral tinnitus, 20 age-matched and hearing loss-matched subjects without tinnitus, and 10 young normal- hearing subjects participated in the study. to determine the characteris- tics of the tinnitus, subjects matched an external sound to their perceived tinnitus in pitch and loudness. to determine the minimum detectable gap, the gap threshold, an adaptive psychoacoustic test was performed three times by each subject. in this gap detection test, four different stimuli, with various frequencies and bandwidths, were presented at three intensity levels each