Contribution
Exploring the Impact of Room Acoustics on Auditory Selective Attention
* 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 using a binaural reproduction to create a lifelike acoustic environment for participants. However, also room acoustic parameters need to be considered. For example, international recommendations for reverberation times in unoccupied classrooms range from 0.3 s for good to 0.9 s for bad rooms. To this extent, two classroom scenarios were created using RAVEN. One scenario was designed to have rather favorable room acoustic properties (T30 = 0.48 s), while the other one was expected to be more challenging (T30 = 1.52 s). In a listening test on the auditory selective attention switch using 16 adult participants, both scenarios were live rendered using the RAVEN integration for Virtual Acoustics in Unity. While reaction times remained unaffected, participants made significantly more errors in the bad room acoustic scenario compared to the favorable room or no room acoustic simulation. These findings support that optimizing room acoustic properties in schools is essential to support learning, especially since the detrimental effects are expected to be worse in children.