Article
Exploring the Impact of Realistic Classroom Noise on Auditory Selective Attention (en)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
In recent years, there has been a growing effort to create experiments that mimic real-life situations, aiming to improve the ecological validity of research. From an acoustic point of view, one step in this direction is to use binaural reproduction to create a lifelike acoustic environment for participants. Previous work found that white noise influences the auditory selective attention of children, while adults remain unaffected. However, other findings indicated the importance of investigating realistic noise scenarios with binaural presentation as opposed to monaural noise, as they showed lower levels of impairment in a word identification task. Therefore, the current work introduced spatialized, non-stationary classroom noise with and without semantically meaningful speech. A pilot study with adult participants comparing the impact of different noise types on the switching of auditory selective attention in a virtual classroom scene indicated larger error rates for realistic classroom noise scenarios than white noise.