Temporal masking is the characteristic of the auditory system where sounds are hidden due to maskers which have just disappeared, or even after maskers which are about to appear. The effect of masking after a strong sound is called post-masking, and can be in effect up to 200 ms. The pre-masking, where a sound actually is masked by something which appears after it, is relatively short and may last up to 20 ms. An illustration of this can be found in figure 3.
Figure 3: The effect of temporal masking. Picture taken from [5].
Figure 4: Temporal masking with varying masker burst size.
Picture taken from [5].