A neuro-synaptic model of the auditory masking and unmasking process.

A model of bilateral information processing in the auditory system was presented on the basis of the interaction of postsynaptic potentials intra- and inter-nuclei in order to analyze the mechanism of binaural unmasking as well as monaural masking. The system was composed of a bilateral pair of auditory nuclei, which were organized in two parallel afferent systems as well as an efferent system. In the model, bilateral inputs were processed in three stages, i.e., the detection of interaural differences by the first afferent system, the equalization of relative neural timing by the efferent system, and the cancellation of specific spectral components by the second afferent system. Assuming the masking process to be forward and backward inhibitions on the auditory memory of signal by the ones of noise, the unmasking process could be explained as a result of disinhibition by the cancellation of bilateral masker inputs.