Subject: Re: Get lost, Mr. Cochlea!! --- The Brain (Jont Allen ) From: David Mountain <dcm(at)ENGC.BU.EDU> Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 11:01:50 -0500We generally talk about two types of masking, energetic and informational. The former is the sort of masking that Jont is talking about and is probably dominated by what happens in the periphery. The later form of masking is more complex and is clearly central. For example, we often think of the auditory perhiphery as a bank of bandpass filters. It therefore comes as no surprise that a probe tone can be masked by a second tone that is close in frequency. This would be an example of energetic masking. There are other situations where a probe tone can be masked by tones at frequencies well removed from that of the probe tone, a result that would not be expected if the listener just could just attend to the output of a single peripheral filter tuned to the probe tone, hence we would call this informational masking. One of the most striking examples of informational masking that I've heard is with the type of stimuli used by Kidd et. al. (1994, J Acoust Soc Am 95:3475-80). -------------------------------------------------------------------- David C. Mountain, Ph.D. Professor of Biomedical Engineering Boston University 44 Cummington St. Boston, MA 02215 Email: dcm(at)bu.edu Website: http://earlab.bu.edu/dcm/ Phone: (617) 353-4343 FAX: (617) 353-6766 Office: ERB 413