Auditory informational masking and the Ear Club connection

Abstract

Erv Hafter has always made a special effort to promote recognition of young researchers in our field. His Ear Club of 40-plus years has provided a conversant audience for new investigators to test new ideas and his attendant hospitality has helped forge relationships valued throughout one’s career. In this talk, I will describe how my own work benefited from visits with Erv. The focus is on informational masking (IM). I will present recent work suggesting a strong connection between two major, but seemingly unrelated, factors associated with IM: masker uncertainty and target-masker similarity. Experiments involving multitone pattern discrimination, multi-talker word recognition, sound-source identification, and sound localization are described. In each case, standard manipulations of masker uncertainty and target-masker similarity (including the covariation of target-masker frequencies) are found to have the same effect on performance provided they produce the same change in the information divergence of target and masker, a measure of statistical separation between signals from information theory. The results seem to reflect a general perceptual principle that segregates signals based on differences in their statistical structure. Future plans are to test the generality of this result in a simulated-cocktail-party environment [Hafter et al. Intl. Symp. Hearing, in press].