Masking period patterns (MPPs) were measured in listeners with normal and impaired hearing using amplitude-modulated tonal maskers and short tonal probes. The frequency of the masker was either the same as the frequency of the probe (on-frequency masking) or was one octave below the frequency of the probe (off-frequency masking). In experiment 1, MPPs were measured for listeners with normal hea...

Forward masking is traditionally measured with a detection task in which the addition of a preceding masking sound results in an increased signal-detection threshold. Little is known about the influence of forward masking on localization of free-field sound for human or animal subjects. Here we recorded gaze shifts of two head-unrestrained cats during localization using a search-coil technique....

In this paper, we propose a noise-robust blind speech separation (BSS) method by using two microphones. We first use modulation domain real and imaginary spectral subtraction (MRISS) to enhance both magnitude and phase spectra of the speech mixture inputs. We then estimate the direction of arrivals (DOAs) of the speech sources and perform time-acoustic-modulation frequency masking to recover th...

Yang and Blake (1991 Vision Research 31 1177-1189) investigated depth detection in stereograms containing spatially narrow-band signal and noise energies. The resulting masking functions led them to conclude that stereo vision was subserved by only two channels peaking at 3 and 5 cycles deg-1. Glennerster and Parker (1997 Vision Research 37 2143-2152) re-analysed these data, taking into account...

Changes in the physiological properties of senescent V1 neurons suggest that the mechanisms encoding spatial frequency in primate cortex may become more broadly tuned in old age (Zhang et al., European Journal of Neuroscience, 2008, 28, 201-207). We examined this possibility in two psychophysical experiments that used masking to estimate the bandwidth of spatial frequency-selective mechanisms i...

Sensorineural hearing loss causes reduction in frequency resolving capacity of the ear due to spread of masking of frequency components by adjacent frequency components. We have carried out experimental evaluation of splitting speech into two complementary signals on the basis of frequency and presenting it binaurally for increasing the speech intelligibility. In this scheme, input speech signa...

The goal of this study was to evaluate the mechanisms underlying Vernier acuity, over a range of spatial scales using narrow-band Vernier stimuli and oblique masking. Specifically, the test stimuli consisted of a pair of vertical ribbons of horizontal cosine grating with a vertical Vernier offset between the ribbons. These stimuli have two important advantages for studying Vernier acuity: (1) t...

Synchronous envelope fluctuations in different frequency ranges of an acoustic background enhance the detection of signals in background noise. This effect, termed comodulation masking release (CMR), is attributed to both processing within one frequency channel of the auditory system and comparisons across separate frequency channels. Here we present data on CMR from a study in field L2 of the ...

Forward-masking growth functions for on-frequency (6-kHz) and off-frequency (3-kHz) sinusoidal maskers were measured in quiet and in a high-pass noise just above the 6-kHz probe frequency. The data show that estimates of response-growth rates obtained from those functions in quiet, which have been used to infer cochlear compression, are strongly dependent on the spread of probe excitation towar...