How does realistic classroom noise affect auditory selective attention?

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 154, pp. A114

Abstract

In the past years, more and more effort has been made to bring the reality in the lab to investigate cognitive performance in a close-to real life manner and, thus, increase the validity of current research. A first step towards being ecologically valid is using a dynamic binaural reproduction, which offers an accurate representation and allows the participants to engage in the acoustic scene. In a study on noise effects regarding the auditory selective attention of children, Loh et al. 2021 found that children were impaired by noise, while adults remained unaffected. However, they used white noise at a comparably low signal-to-noise ratio. To investigate the impact of a realistic scenario, the current work investigated a fluctuating realistic classroom noise using typical noise sources such as writing and the movement of chairs. Additionally, semantically meaningful speech was added as an attention capturing noise source. To get first insights into the effects of this realistic noise, a pilot study was conducted with adult participants in a virtual classroom scene.

Authors 6

1. Carolin Breuer Aachen Inst. for Hearing Technol. and Acoust. (IHTA)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Inst. for Hearing Technol. and Acoust. (IHTA), RWTH Aachen Univ., Aachen, Germany

2. Larissa Leist

   University of Kaiserslautern · Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau

   Affiliation as printed

   Cognit. and Developmental Psych., Rheinland-Pfälzische Technischen Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau, Kaiserslautern, Germany

3. Stephan Fremerey
4. Alexander Raake

   Technische Universität Ilmenau

   Affiliation as printed

   Audiovisual Technol. Group, Technische Universität Ilmenau, Ilmenau, Germany

5. Maria Klatte

   University of Kaiserslautern · Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau

   Affiliation as printed

   Cognit. and Developmental Psych., Rheinland-Pfälzische Technischen Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau, Kaiserslautern, Germany

6. Janina Fels corresponding Aachen Inst. for Hearing Technol. and Acoust. (IHTA)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Inst. for Hearing Technol. and Acoust. (IHTA), RWTH Aachen Univ., Kopernikusstr. 5, Aachen 52074, Germany, Janina.Fels@akustik.rwth-aachen.de