Understanding response proclivity and the limits of sensory capability: What do we hear and what can we hear?

Abstract

Charles Watson’s studies of informational masking and the effects of stimulus uncertainty on auditory perception have had a profound impact on auditory research. His series of seminal studies in the mid-1970s on the detection and discrimination of target sounds in sequences of brief tones with uncertain properties addresses the fundamental problem of extracting target signals from background sounds. As conceptualized by Chuck and others, informational masking results from more central (even ‘‘cogneetive’’) processes as a consequence of stimulus uncertainty, and can be distinguished from ‘‘energetic’’ masking, which primarily arises from the auditory periphery. Informational masking techniques are now in common use to study the detection, discrimination, and recognition of complex sounds, the capacity of auditory memory and aspects of auditory selective attention, the often large effects of training to reduce detrimental effects of uncertainty, and the perceptual segregation of target sounds from irrelevant context sounds. This paper will present an overview of past and current research on informational masking, and show how Chuck’s work has been expanded in several directions by other scientists to include the effects of informational masking on speech perception and on perception by listeners with hearing impairment. [Work supported by NIDCD.]