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Cognition Jan 2024Metacontrast masking is one of the most widely studied types of visual masking, in which a visual stimulus is rendered invisible by a subsequent mask that does not...
Metacontrast masking is one of the most widely studied types of visual masking, in which a visual stimulus is rendered invisible by a subsequent mask that does not spatially overlap with the target. Metacontrast has been used for many decades as a tool to study visual processing and conscious perception in adults. However, there are so far no infant studies on metacontrast and it remains unknown even whether it occurs in infants. The present study examined metacontrast masking in 3- to 8-month-old infants (N = 168) using a habituation paradigm. We found that metacontrast is ineffective for infants under 7 months and that younger infants can perceive a masked stimulus that older infants cannot. Our results suggest that metacontrast is distinct from other simple types of masking that occur in early infancy, and would be consistent with the idea that metacontrast results from the disruption of recurrent processing.
Topics: Adult; Humans; Infant; Perceptual Masking; Visual Perception; Consciousness
PubMed: 37984131
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105666 -
Hearing Research Dec 2023Many individuals with chronic subjective tinnitus report significant problems in comprehending speech in adverse listening situations. A large body of studies has...
Many individuals with chronic subjective tinnitus report significant problems in comprehending speech in adverse listening situations. A large body of studies has provided evidence to support the notion that deficits in speech-in-noise (SIN) are prevalent in the tinnitus population, while some studies have challenged these findings. Elemental auditory perception is usually only minimally or not impaired. In addition, deficits in cognitive functions, particularly executive functions, have also been observed in individuals with tinnitus. Given these previous findings, we theorize that deficient central mechanisms may be responsible for the reported speech comprehension problems in tinnitus. 25 participants suffering from chronic subjective tinnitus and 25 control participants, between 23 and 58 years of age, were examined in a cross-sectional design. The groups were case-matched for age, sex, education, and hearing loss. A large audiometric battery was used ranging from threshold and supra-threshold tasks to spoken sentence level speech tasks. Additionally, four cognitive tests were performed, primarily covering the area of executive functions. Tinnitometry and tinnitus-related questionnaires were applied to complement sample description and allow for secondary analyses. We hypothesized that tinnitus participants score lower in complex speech comprehension tasks and executive function tasks compared to healthy controls, while no group differences in elementary audiometric tasks were expected. As expected, individuals with chronic subjective tinnitus scored lower in the SIN and gated speech task, while there were no differences in the basic speech recognition threshold task and the other elementary auditory perception tasks. The cognitive tests revealed clear deficits in interference control in the Stroop task, but not in the Flanker task, in the tinnitus group. There were no differences in inhibition or working memory tasks. Our results clearly delineate differences between tinnitus individuals and control participants in two tests on speech intelligibility under adverse listening conditions. Further, the poorer performance in a task of interference control in individuals with tinnitus points towards an impaired central executive control in individuals with tinnitus. Taken together, our (partly) exploratory study provides novel evidence to the view that deficient central executive system in individuals with tinnitus probably account for impaired speech comprehension.
Topics: Humans; Tinnitus; Executive Function; Comprehension; Cross-Sectional Studies; Auditory Threshold; Speech Perception; Perceptual Masking; Speech Intelligibility
PubMed: 37979435
DOI: 10.1016/j.heares.2023.108914 -
Scientific Reports Nov 2023Heterophoria is a common type of binocular fusion disorder that consists of a latent eye misalignment with potential consequences on daily activities such as reading or...
Heterophoria is a common type of binocular fusion disorder that consists of a latent eye misalignment with potential consequences on daily activities such as reading or working on a computer (with CVS). Crowding, a type of contextual modulation, can also impair reading. Our recent studies found an abnormal pattern of low-level visual processing with larger perceptive fields (PF) in heterophoria. The PF is the fundamental processing unit of human vision and both masking and crowding depend on its size. We investigated how heterophoria would impact the PF's size via a lateral masking experiment and consequently affect the foveal crowding at different letter-spacings (the crowding zone). More specifically, we explored the relationship between crowding, lateral masking, the PF's size, and the amount of heterophoria. The binocular horizontal PF's size was larger with heterophoric subjects, in agreement with our previous study. We found a stronger crowding and an extended crowding zone associated with slower response times; this shows that the processing of letter identification under both crowded and uncrowded conditions requires more processing effort in heterophoric individuals. In agreement with previous studies, we found a correlation between the crowding zone and the PF's size; each was strongly correlated with the amount of phoria. These findings resemble those involving the PF size and the extended crowding found at the fovea in amblyopia and young children. We suggest that these findings could help explain the inter-observers' variability found in the masking literature, and the reading difficulties often encountered in subjects with high heterophoria.
Topics: Child; Humans; Child, Preschool; Visual Acuity; Perceptual Masking; Visual Perception; Amblyopia; Strabismus; Malocclusion; Pattern Recognition, Visual
PubMed: 37935803
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-46291-w -
PloS One 2023Differences in spectro-temporal degradation may explain some variability in cochlear implant users' speech outcomes. The present study employs vocoder simulations on...
Differences in spectro-temporal degradation may explain some variability in cochlear implant users' speech outcomes. The present study employs vocoder simulations on listeners with typical hearing to evaluate how differences in degree of channel interaction across ears affects spatial speech recognition. Speech recognition thresholds and spatial release from masking were measured in 16 normal-hearing subjects listening to simulated bilateral cochlear implants. 16-channel sine-vocoded speech simulated limited, broad, or mixed channel interaction, in dichotic and diotic target-masker conditions, across ears. Thresholds were highest with broad channel interaction in both ears but improved when interaction decreased in one ear and again in both ears. Masking release was apparent across conditions. Results from this simulation study on listeners with typical hearing show that channel interaction may impact speech recognition more than masking release, and may have implications for the effects of channel interaction on cochlear implant users' speech recognition outcomes.
Topics: Humans; Cochlear Implants; Speech; Perceptual Masking; Speech Perception; Cochlear Implantation
PubMed: 37917727
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0287728 -
Digital Health 2023The Healthy China 2030 strategy outlines the government's plans for healthcare reform, emphasizing the need for increased awareness about infectious diseases to prevent...
OBJECTIVES
The Healthy China 2030 strategy outlines the government's plans for healthcare reform, emphasizing the need for increased awareness about infectious diseases to prevent and fight future infections. Information campaigns can be used as a medium to raise awareness and encourage citizens' willingness to protect themselves against diseases, such as COVID-19. Extant studies have found that individual health behavior decision-making can be changed under different information frames. However, limited evidence is available about emerging infectious diseases. Based on the Prospect Theory and Theory of Planned Behavior, the impact of information frames on self-protective behavior-vaccination against COVID-19 is investigated in this study.
METHODS
A 2(gain/loss frame)*2(factual/emotional frame) intergroup experimental design was designed to explore the effects of different information frames. 228 valid participants in China were recruited and the experiment was performed online.
RESULTS
First, the gain frame was more effective in promoting public self-protection behavior than the loss frame under information frame intervention. Compared with the factual frame, the emotional frame is more effective in reducing individual risk perception. Second, perceptual behavior control has masking effects on self-protection behavior under the influence of the gain/loss frame. Third, age, subjective norms, attitudes, and the gain frame, have predictive effects on self-protection behavior.
CONCLUSIONS
This study provides empirical evidence on the impact of information framing interventions on public self-protection behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic and provides important practical implications for public administrators and media practitioners.
PubMed: 37915790
DOI: 10.1177/20552076231210655 -
Trends in Hearing 2023Auditory filter (AF) shape has traditionally been estimated with a combination of a notched-noise (NN) masking experiment and a power spectrum model (PSM) of masking....
Auditory filter (AF) shape has traditionally been estimated with a combination of a notched-noise (NN) masking experiment and a power spectrum model (PSM) of masking. However, there are several challenges that remain in both the simultaneous and forward masking paradigms. We hypothesized that AF shape estimation would be improved if absolute threshold (AT) and a level-dependent internal noise were explicitly represented in the PSM. To document the interaction between NN threshold and AT in normal hearing (NH) listeners, a large set of NN thresholds was measured at four center frequencies (500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz) with the emphasis on low-level maskers. The proposed PSM, consisting of the compressive gammachirp (cGC) filter and three nonfilter parameters, allowed AF estimation over a wide range of frequencies and levels with fewer coefficients and less error than previous models. The results also provided new insights into the nonfilter parameters. The detector signal-to-noise ratio () was found to be constant across signal frequencies, suggesting that no frequency dependence hypothesis is required in the postfiltering process. The ANSI standard "Hearing Level-0dB" function, i.e., AT of NH listeners, could be applied to the frequency distribution of the noise floor for the best AF estimation. The introduction of a level-dependent internal noise could mitigate the nonlinear effects that occur in the simultaneous NN masking paradigm. The new PSM improves the applicability of the model, particularly when the sound pressure level of the NN threshold is close to AT.
Topics: Humans; Auditory Threshold; Perceptual Masking; Noise; Pressure; Signal-To-Noise Ratio
PubMed: 37905400
DOI: 10.1177/23312165231209750 -
Behavioral Sciences (Basel, Switzerland) Sep 2023How people recognize linguistic and emotional prosody in different listening conditions is essential for understanding the complex interplay between social context,...
How people recognize linguistic and emotional prosody in different listening conditions is essential for understanding the complex interplay between social context, cognition, and communication. The perception of both lexical tones and emotional prosody depends on prosodic features including pitch, intensity, duration, and voice quality. However, it is unclear which aspect of prosody is perceptually more salient and resistant to noise. This study aimed to investigate the relative perceptual salience of emotional prosody and lexical tone recognition in quiet and in the presence of multi-talker babble noise. Forty young adults randomly sampled from a pool of native Mandarin Chinese with normal hearing listened to monosyllables either with or without background babble noise and completed two identification tasks, one for emotion recognition and the other for lexical tone recognition. Accuracy and speed were recorded and analyzed using generalized linear mixed-effects models. Compared with emotional prosody, lexical tones were more perceptually salient in multi-talker babble noise. Native Mandarin Chinese participants identified lexical tones more accurately and quickly than vocal emotions at the same signal-to-noise ratio. Acoustic and cognitive dissimilarities between linguistic prosody and emotional prosody may have led to the phenomenon, which calls for further explorations into the underlying psychobiological and neurophysiological mechanisms.
PubMed: 37887450
DOI: 10.3390/bs13100800 -
Frontiers in Psychology 2023Previous experiments purportedly showed that image-based factors like convexity were sufficient for figure assignment. Recently, however, we found that the probability...
Backward masking implicates cortico-cortical recurrent processes in convex figure context effects and cortico-thalamic recurrent processes in resolving figure-ground ambiguity.
INTRODUCTION
Previous experiments purportedly showed that image-based factors like convexity were sufficient for figure assignment. Recently, however, we found that the probability of perceiving a figure on the convex side of a central border was only slightly higher than chance for two-region displays and increased with the number of display regions; this increase was observed only when the concave regions were homogeneously colored. These convex figure context effects (CEs) revealed that figure assignment in these classic displays entails more than a response to local convexity. A Bayesian observer replicated the convex figure CEs using both a convexity object prior and a new, homogeneous background prior and made the novel prediction that the classic displays in which both the convex and concave regions were homogeneous were ambiguous during perceptual organization.
METHODS
Here, we report three experiments investigating the proposed ambiguity and examining how the convex figure CEs unfold over time with an emphasis on whether they entail recurrent processing. Displays were shown for 100 ms followed by pattern masks after ISIs of 0, 50, or 100 ms. The masking conditions were designed to add noise to recurrent processing and therefore to delay the outcome of processes in which they play a role. In Exp. 1, participants viewed two- and eight-region displays with homogeneous convex regions (homo-convex displays; the putatively ambiguous displays). In Exp. 2, participants viewed putatively unambiguous hetero-convex displays. In Exp. 3, displays and masks were presented to different eyes, thereby delaying mask interference in the thalamus for up to 100 ms.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The results of Exps. 1 and 2 are consistent with the interpretation that recurrent processing is involved in generating the convex figure CEs and resolving the ambiguity of homo-convex displays. The results of Exp. 3 suggested that corticofugal recurrent processing is involved in resolving the ambiguity of homo-convex displays and that cortico-cortical recurrent processes play a role in generating convex figure CEs and these two types of recurrent processes operate in parallel. Our results add to evidence that perceptual organization evolves dynamically and reveal that stimuli that seem unambiguous can be ambiguous during perceptual organization.
PubMed: 37809293
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1243405 -
Trends in Hearing 2023While each place on the cochlea is most sensitive to a specific frequency, it will generally respond to a sufficiently high-level stimulus over a wide range of...
While each place on the cochlea is most sensitive to a specific frequency, it will generally respond to a sufficiently high-level stimulus over a wide range of frequencies. This spread of excitation can introduce errors in clinical threshold estimation during a diagnostic auditory brainstem response (ABR) exam. Off-frequency cochlear excitation can be mitigated through the addition of masking noise to the test stimuli, but introducing a masker increases the already long test times of the typical ABR exam. Our lab has recently developed the parallel ABR (pABR) paradigm to speed up test times by utilizing randomized stimulus timing to estimate the thresholds for multiple frequencies simultaneously. There is reason to believe parallel presentation of multiple frequencies provides masking effects and improves place specificity while decreasing test times. Here, we use two computational models of the auditory periphery to characterize the predicted effect of parallel presentation on place specificity in the auditory nerve. We additionally examine the effect of stimulus rate and level. Both models show the pABR is at least as place specific as standard methods, with an improvement in place specificity for parallel presentation (vs. serial) at high levels, especially at high stimulus rates. When simulating hearing impairment in one of the models, place specificity was also improved near threshold. Rather than a tradeoff, this improved place specificity would represent a secondary benefit to the pABR's faster test times.
Topics: Humans; Auditory Threshold; Perceptual Masking; Evoked Potentials, Auditory, Brain Stem; Noise; Brain Stem; Acoustic Stimulation
PubMed: 37807857
DOI: 10.1177/23312165231205719 -
The Journal of the Acoustical Society... Oct 2023Individual differences in spatial tuning for masked target speech identification were determined using maskers that varied in type and proximity to the target source....
Individual differences in spatial tuning for masked target speech identification were determined using maskers that varied in type and proximity to the target source. The maskers were chosen to produce three strengths of informational masking (IM): high [same-gender, speech-on-speech (SOS) masking], intermediate (the same masker speech time-reversed), and low (speech-shaped, speech-envelope-modulated noise). Typical for this task, individual differences increased as IM increased, while overall performance decreased. To determine the extent to which auditory performance might generalize to another sensory modality, a comparison visual task was also implemented. Visual search time was measured for identifying a cued object among "clouds" of distractors that were varied symmetrically in proximity to the target. The visual maskers also were chosen to produce three strengths of an analog of IM based on feature similarities between the target and maskers. Significant correlations were found for overall auditory and visual task performance, and both of these measures were correlated with an index of general cognitive reasoning. Overall, the findings provide qualified support for the proposition that the ability of an individual to solve IM-dominated tasks depends on cognitive mechanisms that operate in common across sensory modalities.
Topics: Speech; Individuality; Task Performance and Analysis; Perceptual Masking; Speech Perception; Auditory Threshold; Cognition
PubMed: 37800988
DOI: 10.1121/10.0021301