A vernier, presented for a short time, shines through a following grating if the grating contains nine and more elements but remains largely invisible for smaller gratings. Therefore, extended grating masks yield, surprisingly, less masking than smaller ones. Here, we show that this mask size effect is not unique to grating masks. Masking diminishes if the size of classical pattern-, noise-, li...

Despite a well-known behavioral finding of visual backward masking impairment in schizophrenia, its underlying neural mechanism remains obscure. This study examined neural correlates of a distinct type of visual backward masking, object substitution masking (OSM), in schizophrenia. Twenty schizophrenia patients and 26 healthy controls completed a 4-Dot OSM task and three functional localizer ta...

When a masking sound is spatially separated from a target speech signal, substantial releases from masking typically occur both for speech and noise maskers. However, when a delayed copy of the masker is also presented at the location of the target speech (a condition that has been referred to as the front target, right-front masker or F-RF configuration), the advantages of spatial separation v...

When participants discriminate stimuli that are masked by a following stimulus via metacontrast masking, stable individually different masking functions have been found despite identical stimulation conditions.In the present study, in one group of observers objective performance increased with increasing target-mask stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), whereas in another group performance decreased...

Masking of low- (4 kHz) and high-frequency (25 kHz) signals by one-octave bandpass maskers either spatially coincident with the signal or contralateral to it was examined in mice, 4-6 and 20-22 months of age, in the free field. Signals were presented 120 ms prior to a startle stimulus and differences in their inhibition of the startle reflex, relative to startle stimulus alone trials, were used...

Behavioral measures of spatial selectivity in cochlear implants are important both for guiding the programing of individual users' implants and for the evaluation of different stimulation methods. However, the methods used are subject to a number of confounding factors that can contaminate estimates of spatial selectivity. These factors include off-site listening, charge interactions between ma...

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) is a promising approach for investigating the white matter microstructure of the spinal cord. However, it suffers from severe susceptibility, physiological, and instrumental artifacts present in the cord. Retrospective correction techniques are popular approaches to reduce these artifacts, because they are widely applicable and do not increase scan time. In this p...

We measured the strength and optimal target-mask onset asynchrony (SOA(max)) of metacontrast masking using Gabor patches as targets and sinusoidal rings with Gaussian envelopes as masks. We varied spatial frequencies (f) between 0.5 and 8 cpd to manipulate the degree to which spatial frequency channels in the visual system are triggered. By varying spatial frequencies as well as spatial frequen...

Noise has an effect on speech production. Stationary noise and babble have been used in the past but the effect of a competing talker, which might be expected to cause different types of disruption, has rarely been investigated. The current study examined the acoustic and phonetic consequences of N-talker noise on sentence production for a range of values of N from 1 (competing talker) to infin...

BACKGROUND Cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is considered to be effective for the symptoms of schizophrenia. However, this view is based mainly on meta-analysis, whose findings can be influenced by failure to consider sources of bias. AIMS To conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of the effectiveness of CBT for schizophrenic symptoms that includes an examination of potential source...