Understanding informational masking from a neural perspective

Abstract

Historically, psychoacousticians have divided the influence of a task-irrelevant sound (a masker) on perception of a task-relevant sound (the target) into components of 1) energetic masking and 2) informational masking. In this apportionment, energetic masking is defined as that masking that can be accounted for by considering how reliably the target is represented in the auditory periphery, and how much the masker disrupts this target representation. In contrast, the term informational masking is a catchall representing any effects of the masker that could not be accounted for by energetic masking. This talk presents a framework for understanding informational masking from a neural perspective, building on both behavioral results and neuro-imaging data. In this account, informational masking is a result of bottlenecks in the neural processing of acoustic information, a problem that the brain mediates by engaging auditory attention. Auditory attention operates by modulating the representation of different auditory objects making up a particular acoustic scene, resulting in a relative enhancement of whatever object is in the attentional foreground at the expense of the representation of competing sources. Thus, most informational masking arises from failures of target formation and/or failures of target selection. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.