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Hello All,
I am in the process of reviewing literature related to the effects of
"informational" and/or "perceptual" masking on speech understanding. I have
found the use of these terms in isolation to describe the additional masking
effects of a two (or several) talker babble/interferers above that of
a spectrally matched modulated (or unmodulated) noise. In my cursory review I
have noticed several authors use the term "perceptual masking" to describe this
phenomenon (e.g. Carhart and colleagues, 1966, 1968, 1975; Hall, et al., 2002),
while others use the term "informational masking" to describe a seemingly
similar phenomenon (e.g. Freyman, et al., 1999; Brungart and colleagues, 2001a,
2001b, 2002).
The terms seem to have come from different camps of researchers that were
investigating the impact of the same phenomenon on somewhat different aspects of
auditory perception. Carhart et al., were looking at additional masking effects
(above simple power summation) of two (multi)-talker maskers compared to steady
state (or modulated) noise maskers and used the term "perceptual masking" to
describe the effects. In contrast, Pollack (1975), Watson and colleagues
(1975,1976) and others have examined the impact of stimulus uncertainty on
various detection tasks and used the term "informational masking" to describe
the additional masking effects of uncertainty above that of traditional
"energetic masking". More recent papers (e.g. Freyman, et al., 1999; Brungart
and colleagues, 2001a, 2001b, 2002 and others I'm sure) have used this term to
describe additional masking in some speech understanding tasks similar to that
described by Carhart.
Sorry for the long post but I am simply trying to confirm the history and
usage of the terms. Any comments regarding how to best
combine/differentiate these terms would be helpful.
Ben Hornsby
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