Underwater noise, whether of natural or anthropogenic origin, has the ability to interfere with the way in which marine mammals receive acoustic signals (i.e., for communication, social interaction, foraging, navigation, etc.). This phenomenon, termed auditory masking, has been well studied in humans and terrestrial vertebrates (in particular birds), but less so in marine mammals. Anthropogenic...

The dynamic properties of a neural network model of visual perception, called the boundary contour system, explain characteristics of metacontrast visual masking. Computer simulations of the model, with a single set of parameters, demonstrate that it accounts for 9 key properties of metacontrast masking: Metacontrast masking is strongest at positive stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs); decreasin...

There are serious methodological problems in studies which report contralateral visual masking. Contralateral masking occurs when detection of a hemifield target stimulus is impaired by a pattern-masking stimulus presented to the opposite hemifield. We demonstrate that, in studies which used positive stimuli (i.e., black letters on a white field), contralateral masking may be an artifact. Altho...

Detection of a Gabor pattern is impaired in the presence of a similar pattern of orthogonal orientation, a phenomenon known as cross-orientation masking (XOM). Here we investigate the role of color in cross-orientation masking. We measured contrast detection thresholds to horizontally oriented Gabors overlaid by similar Gabors of a different orientation. Red-green chromatic masking was compared...

We consider the observational signature of the dynamical eeects on the lumi-nosity function of globular clusters. For the three best studied systems, in Milky Way, M31, and M87, there is a statistically signiicant diierence between the inner and outer population of globular clusters. In all cases the inner clusters are on average brighter than the outer clusters (0:26 < m 0 < 0:84) and have a s...

A novel audio protection and authentication scheme is proposed in this paper. By quantizing a host audio’s FFTcoefficients as masking threshold units (MTUs), two complementary watermarks are designed and embedded using our cocktail watermarking method. For audio protection, high robustness can be achieved; whereas for audio authentication, tampered regions can be detected. Both of the above men...

A frequency-modulation term has been added to the gammatone auditory filter to produce a filter with an asymmetric amplitude spectrum. When the degree of asymmetry in this ‘‘gammachirp’’ auditory filter is associated with stimulus level, the gammachirp is found to provide an excellent fit to 12 sets of notched-noise masking data from three different studies. The gammachirp has a well-defined im...

Contralateral masking is the phenomenon where a masker presented to one ear affects the ability to detect a signal in the opposite ear. For normal hearing listeners, contralateral masking results in masking patterns that are both sharper and dramatically smaller in magnitude than ipsilateral masking. The goal of this study was to investigate whether medial olivocochlear (MOC) efferents are need...