MATERIALS and METHODS: On the whole, 48 subjects were enrolled into the present study: 16 older patients with MCI, 16 older subjects without cognitive impairment (controls), and 16 normally hearing young individuals. All subjects underwent speech audiometry in noise in order to evaluate the effect of different types of masking: two kinds of energetic masking, stationary and fluctuating noise, a...

BACKGROUND Currently, acute upper respiratory tract infections (AURTIs) are increasingly becoming a significant health burden. Gankeshuangqing dispersible tablets (GKSQDT) which have a good effect on treating AURTIs. GKSQDT is composed of baicalin and andrographolide. However, its severe bitterness limits application of patients. Due to the addition of plentiful accessories, common masking meth...

The purpose of this study is to clarify the role of suppression in the growth of masking when a signal is well above the masker in frequency (upward spread of masking). Classical psychophysical models assume that masking is primarily due to the spread of masker excitation, and that the nonlinear upward spread of masking reflects a differential growth in excitation between the masker and the sig...

The ability to process facial expressions can be modified by altering the spatial frequency of the stimuli, an effect that has been attributed to differential properties of visual pathways that convey different types of information to distinct brain regions at different speeds. While this effect suggests a potential influence of spatial frequency on the processing speed of facial emotion, this ...

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....

Perspectives on wanted and unwanted sounds in outdoor environments Studies of masking, stress recovery, and speech intelligibility Jesper Alvarsson To my too tolerant partner and children vii Abstract An acoustic environment contains sounds from various sound sources, some generally perceived as wanted, others as unwanted. This thesis examines the effects of wanted and unwanted sounds in acoust...

Discrimination thresholds were obtained using a delayed spatial frequency discrimination task. In Experiment 1, we found that presentation of a mask 3 s before onset of a reference Gabor patch caused a selective, spatial frequency dependent interference in a subsequent discrimination task. However, a 10 s interval abolished this masking effect. In Experiment 2, the mask was associated with a se...

objectives: masking ability of a restorative material plays a role in hiding colored substructures; however, the masking ability of zirconia ceramic (zrc) has not yet been clearly understood in zirconia-based restorations. this study evaluated the effect of three different core materials on masking ability of a zrc. materials and methods: ten zirconia disc samples, 0.5mm in thickness and 10mm i...

In this paper, a hybrid active noise barrier (ANB) with sound masking capability is considered. To protect the speech privacy, several sound masking techniques have been developed. However, these sound masking techniques based on the superposition of the masker and original sound will lead to increase in the loudness of the sound after masking. Against this problem, this paper proposes a soundp...