Neural correlates of perceptual awareness versus informational masking in human auditory cortex: An MEG study

The perceptual awareness and detection of a particular auditory stream in complex acoustic environments is not only limited by the ears resolution, but also by competition within the central auditory system. The finding of hampered auditory detection in cases where classical masking is avoided is generally referred to as „informational masking“ in the psychoacoustic literature [1]. The neural mechanisms of informational masking remain largely unexplored. Here we present a series of experiments that investigate mechanisms of informational masking and auditory perceptual awareness using magnetoencephalography (MEG…