The method of psychological active control, in which a neutral or pleasant sound (masking sound) is superimposed on an unpleasant sound, is effective in increasing the pleasantness of the auditory environment. In present study, we examined the effects of presenting a masking sound with a motion picture in psychological active control. We presented a type of masking sound (music) and one of the three types of motion pictures (road traffic picture, dynamic noise, natural picture) with one of the two types of noise sounds (road traffic noise, white noise). Presenting road traffic picture with road traffic noise, and natural picture with white noise, reduced the unpleasantness of the noise sounds. These results suggest that presenting motion picture with masking sound is effective in increasing the pleasantness of environment. This effect was restricted to the case in which the pictures are situationally matched with the noise sounds. Also, our results showed that the effect depends on the level of noise sound.

When two targets are presented in a rapid succession, correct identification of the first target results in detection deficit for the second target because of effects of visual attention. In the present study we measured temporal effects of visual attention with increment luminance thresholds of a second target. We also obtained that temporal effects of visual attention were influenced by difficulty of a first attention task. The results showed that detection sensitivity of the second target in the double-task condition decreased up to about 500 ms when the first target was accurately detected. It was also shown that when the first task was easier detection sensitivity of the second target was recovered more rapidly.