Presentation
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The impact of realistic background noises on neural and physiological response to speech, in a Virtual-Reality classroom
Poster D68 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Orel Levy1, Shirley Hackmon1, Yair Zvilichovsky1, Adi Korisky1, Elana Zion Golumbic1; 1Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
Speech comprehension in real-life situations can be challenging, due to the omnipresence of irrelevant sounds or background noise. Here we studied how different types of realistic sounds and background noises affects neural processing of speech and ongoing ocular and physiological responses. Using Virtual Reality (VR), we investigated this question in an ecologically-relevant audiovisual context where listening to speech over long periods of time and avoiding distraction is particularly important: The Classroom. In a series of experiments, we measured neural activity (EEG), eye-gaze patterns and galvanic skin response (GSR), while participants listened to a series of mini-lectures in a VR classroom. In Experiment 1, we investigated the impact of hearing continuous or intermittent construction noise in the background of the classroom, and in Experiment 2 we studied the effects of occasional transient sounds such as phone-ringtones and coughs. We also explored whether responses to background events are similar or different in individuals (adults) with ADHD vs. controls. Our findings indicate that the presence of intermittent background noise reduced the accuracy of neural speech tracking and was associated with increased physiological arousal (indexed by GSR) and poorer behavioral performance, but continuous noise did not seem to affect these measures (Experiment 1). For the transient background auditory events (Experiment 2) we observe clear neural and physiological responses, but no tradeoff was observed between responses to these background events and speech-tracking of the teacher’s voice. Interestingly, responses to background effects were larger in the ADHD group, but no differences in the speech tracking response were found between groups, further suggesting the lack of consistent tradeoffs between them. Spontaneous eye-gaze patterns and neural alpha-power were not affected by any of the experimental modulations, but were correlated with global GSR metrics of arousal, pointing to potentially important individual differences in the aptitude or sensitivity to processing speech in noisy environments. The novel VR experimental platform introduced here contributes to expanding our understanding of the effects of noise on speech processing to increasingly realistic contexts. Our results suggest that, under realistic audiovisual conditions, there is high fidelity for dealing with noise, and not all types of background events detract from neural processing of target-speech. At the same time, these findings also support previous findings that individuals with ADHD are more sensitive to background events, and that some types of noise are more difficult to ignore than others. While far from exhaustive, this work demonstrates the importance of studying speech-in-noise processing and the effects of potential distractors under increasingly realistic and real-life contexts. It also emphasizes the importance of integrating neural, ocular and physiological metrics, which together offer a more well-rounded description of listeners multifaceted response profile to speech in noisy environments.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception,