Forward masking has often been thought of in terms of neural adaptation, with nonlinearities in the growth and decay of forward masking being accounted for by the nonlinearities inherent in adaptation. In contrast, this study presents further evidence for the hypothesis that forward masking can be described as a linear process, once peripheral, mechanical nonlinearities are taken into account. ...

Current models of short-term visual perceptual memory invoke mechanisms that are closely allied to low-level perceptual discrimination mechanisms. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which human visual perceptual memory for spatial frequency is based upon multiple, spatially tuned channels similar to those found in the earliest stages of visual processing. To this end we ...

Technical limitations in image capturing usually impose defective, such as contrast degradation. There are different approaches to improve the contrast of an image. Among the exiting approaches, un-sharp masking is a popular method due to its simplicity in implementation and computation. There is an important parameter in un-sharp masking, named gain factor, which affects the quality of the enh...

In order to improve audio coding performance, excess masking has been employed for the compression of complex audio signals. A new algorithm is developed to classify and pre-process maskers. A psychoacoustic model is used to estimate simultaneous masking threshold. This masking threshold is used for quantizing audio signal coefficients in the frequency domain. Preliminary test results show impr...

The effect of masker-frequency variability on the detection performance of 7-9 month-old infants and adults was examined. Listeners detected a 300-ms 1000-Hz pure tone masked by: (1) A random-frequency two-tone complex; (2) a fixed-frequency two-tone complex; or (3) a broadband noise. Maskers repeated at 300-ms intervals throughout testing at 60 dB SPL. The signal was presented simultaneously w...

The current experiment investigated whether better-ear glimpsing can explain the spatial release achieved by normal-hearing adults when situations are high in informational masking. Both modeling and behavioral methods were used. The speech reception thresholds of 38 young adults were measured for co-located, spatially separated and two better-ear glimpsed conditions. In the better-ear glimpsed...

The efficacy of communication relies on detection of species-specific signals against the background noise. Features affecting signal detection are thus expected to evolve under selective pressures represented by masking noise. Spectral partitioning between the auditory signals of co-occurring species has been interpreted as the outcome of the selective effects of masking interference. However,...

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...

The human color and luminance-driven systems appear to be mediated by mechanisms with distinct spatio-temporal tuning properties, with the iso-luminant color-driven system comparatively less sensitive to high rates of temporal modulation. While color and luminance defined speed and rate discrimination studies indicate perceptual access to the outputs of multiple, overlapping temporal frequency-...

It is generally thought that mean luminance and low spatial frequency information in a visual image are sharply attenuated at the retina, due to processes of light adaptation and the spatial filtering effects of lateral inhibition. Our results from interocular luminance masking suggest, however, that cortical masking effects play a primary role in the attenuation of low frequency sensitivity. R...