OBJECTIVE Patients with schizophrenia consistently show performance deficits on measures of visual backward masking, but the nature of these deficits is not well understood. Performance deficits on backward masking tasks may indicate an underlying predisposition instead of the presence of illness, because deficits are present in unaffected first-degree relatives. Performance deficits in remitte...

Villamar et al. (1) noted that masking was reported at a higher rate in 2010 than it was in 2000, but lamented that other aspects of CONSORT were not similarly improved. To place the reporting of masking in context, imagine a scenario in which the rehabilitation of patients with knee injuries was considered complete and successful as soon as these patients reported feeling better. Imagine a pol...

BACKGROUND Visual masking tasks assess the earliest stages of visual processing. This study examined visual masking performance for forward and backward masking tasks in siblings of schizophrenic patients and healthy comparison subjects. METHODS A staircase method was used to ensure that unmasked target identification was equivalent across subjects to eliminate differences due to discriminati...

A number of masking phenomena can be modeled in terms of a linear auditory filter bank followed by a temporal integrator and a simple decision device based on the signal-to-masker ratio. Other aspects require the inclusion of a nonlinearity following linear filtering. The present article concentrates on aspects of non-simultaneous, or “temporal”, masking that cannot be explained by either model...

Although many researchers have shown that listeners are able to selectively attend to a target speech signal when a masking talker is present in the same ear as the target speech or when a masking talker is present in a different ear than the target speech, little is known about selective auditory attention in tasks with a target talker in one ear and independent masking talkers in both ears at...

Psychometric functions were obtained for the interaural conditions NoSo and NoS•r in both forward and backward masking using masks of different durations. In addition, data were collected for the Sm, S•r, and So conditions without an external mask. The slope parameter k and the signal level required for 76% correct detection were compu,tcd with a least-squares technique. The results were that b...

It has been previously demonstrated that extensive activation in the dorsolateral temporal lobes associated with masking a speech target with a speech masker, consistent with the hypothesis that competition for central auditory processes is an important factor in informational masking. Here, masking from speech and two additional maskers derived from the original speech were investigated. One o...