Masking is said to have occurred when one stimulus interferes with the perception of another. When masking sounds both precede and follow a test sound, the perceptual interference they produce often exceeds the sum of their individual effects. / The present study considers an explanation for this phenomenon based on certain properties of the auditory system's mechanical and neural responses to transient sounds. It is assumed that: (1) the system constructs a preliminary internal representation of the sound's intensity that has a latency inversely related to intensity, (2) the function relating latency to intensity is nonlinear (concave upward), (3) the magnitude of the intensity representation is subsequently compressed--transformed according to a function whose shape is concave downward, and (4) one effect of a preceding masker resembles a simple attenuation of the sound that is masked. One consequence of these assumptions is that a preceding masker will delay the internal representation of the test stimulus more than it will delay the representation of a masker that follows the test stimulus. Thus, combining maskers in this way should produce 'additional masking' that is essentially an increase in the effectiveness of the second masker. / Some psychophysical measurements are described that appear to confirm this interpretation. Two novel interactions of combined maskers were observed in these experiments. One of these was predicted by the model outlined above. The other was not, but could be accounted for by a small modification of the model. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-10, Section: B, page: 3922. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1980.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_74333 |
| Contributors | STANNY, ROBERT RICHARD., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 94 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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