Not being able to see someone's lips moving as they speak is one aspect of mask-wearing that can make communication difficult during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For example, if a row of mask-wearing customers are lined up at different angles a few feet apart waiting for their Starbucks orders in a café filled with lots of ambient chatter, how do baristas know where to focus their attention if they hear someone asking about their order?
In a different social environment, imagine a group of people gathered outside for a holiday "cocktail party" and using straws to sip drinks from behind their masks. How does each partygoer focus his or her attention on what one person is saying while simultaneously blocking out the noisy chitchat of other revelers?
A new study by Virginia Best of Boston University's Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences suggests that in "cocktail party" listening situations, people's eye position steers their visual attention—which, in turn, guides their auditory attention. Her research (Best, 2020) was published earlier this month in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and presented virtually at the 179th Meeting of the ASA on December 9 in a poster session, "An Effect of Eye Position in Cocktail Party Listening."
"Cocktail party listening" is a catch-all phrase the researchers use to describe any multi-talker situation with at least five people, in which the listener is trying to hear what one person is saying over the din of four other people conversing.
Eye Position, Visual Attention and Speech Intelligibility Are Interconnected
"Our primary motivation was an intuition that eye position may be especially critical within these [cocktail party] situations, where there is substantial energetic and informational masking," Best said in a news release. "A secondary motivation was our interest in visually guided beamforming, where the eyes are used to steer a highly directional hearing aid."
For this research, Best and colleagues had a single study participant stand in front of five loudspeakers positioned at 0 degrees, ± 15 degrees, and ± 30 degrees in a spherical curve. First, each participant was asked to "repeat back the digits presented from one target loudspeaker."
In the second phase of this experiment, each participant was given instructions to "visually fixate on the target loudspeaker or on a non-target loudspeaker." Throughout this study, head positions were stabilized and eye positions were continuously tracked using special glasses.
According to Best, this study found that "performance was best when eye fixation was on-target and suffered when eye fixation was off-target, particularly for targets located in the center."
The main takeaway from this research is that eye position and visual attention may influence auditory attention within multi-talker situations consisting of four or more people. "Our task is theoretically applicable to any situation in which there are competing voices, including parties, restaurants, and meeting rooms," Best concluded. "The reason we spend a lot of time studying these situations is because they are extremely difficult for people with hearing impairment and hearing aids." As mentioned, a long-term goal of this research is to develop directional hearing aids that are guided by shifting one's gaze and focusing visual attention on a listening target.
Virginia Best image via EurekAlert
"hear" - Google News
December 10, 2020 at 12:57AM
https://ift.tt/2K7FFtk
How Our Eyes Influence What We Hear - Psychology Today
"hear" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2KTiH6k
https://ift.tt/2Wh3f9n
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "How Our Eyes Influence What We Hear - Psychology Today"
Post a Comment