Selective spatial attention modulates bottom-up informational masking of speech.
Sci Rep
; 5: 8662, 2015 Mar 02.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-25727100
ABSTRACT
To hear out a conversation against other talkers listeners overcome energetic and informational masking. Largely attributed to top-down processes, information masking has also been demonstrated using unintelligible speech and amplitude-modulated maskers suggesting bottom-up processes. We examined the role of speech-like amplitude modulations in information masking using a spatial masking release paradigm. Separating a target talker from two masker talkers produced a 20â
dB improvement in speech reception threshold; 40% of which was attributed to a release from informational masking. When across frequency temporal modulations in the masker talkers are decorrelated the speech is unintelligible, although the within frequency modulation characteristics remains identical. Used as a masker as above, the information masking accounted for 37% of the spatial unmasking seen with this masker. This unintelligible and highly differentiable masker is unlikely to involve top-down processes. These data provides strong evidence of bottom-up masking involving speech-like, within-frequency modulations and that this, presumably low level process, can be modulated by selective spatial attention.
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Perceptual Masking
/
Attention
/
Speech
Limits:
Adult
/
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
Language:
En
Journal:
Sci Rep
Year:
2015
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country: