Psychoacoustic estimates of basilar-membrane compression often compare on- and off-frequency forward masking. Such estimates involve assuming that the recovery from forward masking for a given signal frequency is independent of masker frequency. To test this assumption, thresholds for a brief 4-kHz signal were measured as a function of masker-signal delay. Comparisons were made between on-frequ...

Stimulating the visual system tends to desensitize it to certain stimulus properties. Such desensitization is usually called adaptation or masking, but the distinction between the two is unclear. Nonspecific desensitization by light is usually regarded as adaptation, whereas pattern-specific desensitization is typically considered masking. Here we unify the treatment of such desensitizing pheno...

A new method to reduce the number of multipliers in the design of sharp FIR filter by frequency-response masking technique is presented. The success of the proposed method is based on a modified frequencyresponse masking approach where one of the subfilters in frequency-response masking approach is implemented by Interpolated Finite-Impulse Response (IFIR) technique. We have shown by example th...

Contrast masking was studied psychophysically. A two-alternative forced-choice procedure was used to measure contrast thresholds for 2.0 cpd sine-wave gratings in the presence of masking sine-wave gratings. Thresholds were measured for 11 masker contrasts spanning three log units, and seven masker frequencies ranging +/- one octave from the signal frequency. Corresponding measurements were made...

We present noise robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) using sparseness-based underdetermined blind source separation (BSS) technique. As a representative underdetermined BSS method, we utilized time-frequency masking in this paper. Although time-frequency masking is able to separate target speech from interferences effectively, one should consider two problems. One is that masking does not...

The present investigation relied upon a neurophysiological explanation of visual masking and compared the backward masking susceptibility of hypothetical schizotypal individuals to that of controls. In order to assess the relative contributions of the visual system's transient and sustained channels to the backward masking deficit characteristic of the schizophrenia spectrum, performance within...

To evaluate the possible contribution of high-frequency hearing to frequency discrimination at lower frequencies, pure-tone frequency discrimination tasks at 1200 Hz, with and without high-frequency masking noise, were performed by two highly practiced normal-hearing listeners. Signal levels ranged from 10 to 80 dB SPL. Spectra of the three high-frequency masking noises ranged from 1.8 to 2.1 k...

When a target voice is masked by an increasingly similar masker voice, increases in energetic masking are likely to occur due to increased spectro-temporal overlap in the competing speech waveforms. However, the impact of this increase may be obscured by informational masking effects related to the increased confusability of the target and masking utterances. In this study, the effects of targe...