Consciousness can be manipulated in many ways. Here, we seek to understand whether two such ways, visual masking and pharmacological intervention, share a common pathway in manipulating visual consciousness. We recorded EEG from human participants who performed a backward-masking task in which they had to detect a masked figure form its background (masking strength was varied across trials). In...

PURPOSE This study compared masking release for adults and children with normal hearing and hearing loss. For the participants with hearing loss, masking release using simulated hearing aid amplification with 2 different compression speeds (slow, fast) was compared. METHOD Sentence recognition in unmodulated noise was compared with recognition in modulated noise (masking release). Recognition...

Parkinson's disease (PD) involves facial masking, which may impair social interaction. Older adult observers who viewed segments of videotaped interviews of individuals with PD expressed less interest in relationships with women with higher masking and judged them as less supportive. Masking did not affect ratings of men in these domains, possibly because higher masking violates gender norms fo...

In the last decade, an effort has been made by the research community to find efficient ways to thwart side channel analysis (SCA) against physical implementations of cryptographic algorithms. A common countermeasure for implementations of block ciphers is Boolean masking which randomizes by the bitwise addition of one or several random value(s) to the variables to be protected. However, advanc...

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...

Visual masking provides several key advantages for exploring the earliest stages of visual processing in schizophrenia: it allows for control over timing at the millisecond level, there are several well-supported theories of the underlying neurobiology of visual masking, and it is amenable to examination by electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this pap...

Traffic flow classification has been attracting an increasing interest. Among the exploited flow features, a key role is played by the sequence of packet lengths. We aim at understanding if and how complex it is to obfuscate this information, referred to as packet length masking. Masking can be obtained by means of padding and fragmenting. We define formally what the ideal target of masking is,...

Listeners’ ability to understand a target speaker in the presence of one or more simultaneous competing speakers is subject to two types of masking: Energetic and informational. Energetic masking occurs when target and interfering signals overlap in time and frequency resulting in portions of target becoming inaudible. Informational masking occurs when the listener is unable to segregate the ta...

In a recent paper (Enns, 2004), James Enns demonstrated nearly equivalent and strong backward-masking effects of various types of visual masks at longer target and mask temporal intervals (e.g., 150ms), including strong masking with four dots considered to be a weak mask in standard masking conditions. The principal requirement for strong masking at long temporal intervals was that target had t...