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Stable eye versus mouth preference in a live speech-processing task.

ABSTRACT: Looking at the mouth region is thought to be a useful strategy for speech-perception tasks. The tendency to look at the eyes versus the mouth of another person during speech processing has thus far mainly been studied using screen-based paradigms. In this study, we estimated the eye-mouth-index (EMI) of 38 adult participants in a live setting. Participants were seated across the table from an experimenter, who read sentences out loud for the participant to remember in both a familiar (English) and unfamiliar (Finnish) language. No statistically significant difference in the EMI between the familiar and the unfamiliar languages was observed. Total relative looking time at the mouth also did not predict the number of correctly identified sentences. Instead, we found that the EMI was higher during an instruction phase than during the speech-processing task. Moreover, we observed high intra-individual correlations in the EMI across the languages and different phases of the experiment. We conclude that there are stable individual differences in looking at the eyes versus the mouth of another person. Furthermore, this behavior appears to be flexible and dependent on the requirements of the situation (speech processing or not).

SUBMITTER: Viktorsson C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10409748 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Stable eye versus mouth preference in a live speech-processing task.

Viktorsson Charlotte C Valtakari Niilo V NV Falck-Ytter Terje T Hooge Ignace T C ITC Rudling Maja M Hessels Roy S RS

Scientific reports 20230808 1

Looking at the mouth region is thought to be a useful strategy for speech-perception tasks. The tendency to look at the eyes versus the mouth of another person during speech processing has thus far mainly been studied using screen-based paradigms. In this study, we estimated the eye-mouth-index (EMI) of 38 adult participants in a live setting. Participants were seated across the table from an experimenter, who read sentences out loud for the participant to remember in both a familiar (English) a ...[more]

PMID: 37553414

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Project description:Speech perception under adverse conditions is a multistage process involving a dynamic interplay among acoustic, cognitive, and linguistic factors. Nevertheless, prior research has primarily focused on factors within this complex system in isolation. The primary goal of the present study was to examine the interaction between processing depth and the acoustic challenge of noise and its effect on processing effort during speech perception in noise. Two tasks were used to represent different depths of processing. The speech recognition task involved repeating back a sentence after auditory presentation (higher-level processing), while the tiredness judgment task entailed a subjective judgment of whether the speaker sounded tired (lower-level processing). The secondary goal of the study was to investigate whether pupil response to alteration of dynamic pitch cues stems from difficult linguistic processing of speech content in noise or a perceptual novelty effect due to the unnatural pitch contours. Task-evoked peak pupil response from two groups of younger adult participants with typical hearing was measured in two experiments. Both tasks (speech recognition and tiredness judgment) were implemented in both experiments, and stimuli were presented with background noise in Experiment 1 and without noise in Experiment 2. Increased peak pupil dilation was associated with deeper processing (i.e., the speech recognition task), particularly in the presence of background noise. Importantly, there is a non-additive interaction between noise and task, as demonstrated by the heightened peak pupil dilation to noise in the speech recognition task as compared to in the tiredness judgment task. Additionally, peak pupil dilation data suggest dynamic pitch alteration induced an increased perceptual novelty effect rather than reflecting effortful linguistic processing of the speech content in noise. These findings extend current theories of speech perception under adverse conditions by demonstrating that the level of processing effort expended by a listener is influenced by the interaction between acoustic challenges and depth of linguistic processing. The study also provides a foundation for future work to investigate the effects of this complex interaction in clinical populations who experience both hearing and cognitive challenges.

Project description:IntroductionVisuocognitive performance is closely related to expertise in chess and has been scrutinized by several investigations in the last decades. The results indicate that experts' decision-making benefits from the chunking process, perception and visual strategies. Despite numerous studies which link these concepts, most of these investigations have employed common research designs that do not use real chess play, but create artificial laboratory conditions via screen-based chess stimuli and obtrusive stationary eye tracking with or without capturing of decision-making or virtual reality settings.MethodsThe present study assessed the visuocognitive performance of chess novices, intermediates and experts in a real chess setting. Instead of check detection, find-the-best-move tasks or to distinguish between regions of a chessboard that were relevant or irrelevant to the best move in previous studies, we introduced n-mate tasks and sequentially manipulated their difficulty. Due to the complexity of the tasks, we monitored players' visual strategies in a fine-graded initial phase (different time intervals instead of analysing a fixed number of first fixations) of task-solving and for complete trials, employing non-obtrusive mobile eye tracking, multi-sensor observation and full-automatic annotation of decision-making.ResultsThe results revealed significant expertise-dependent differences in visuocognitive performance based on a circumstantial spatial and temporal analysis. In order to provide more detailed results, for the first time the analyses were performed under the special consideration of different time intervals and spatial scalings. In summary, experts showed a significantly higher number of fixations on areas of interest and empty squares between pieces in the task processing than less-skilled players. However, they had a strikingly low total number of fixations on the whole board and in complete trials.DiscussionAs a conclusion, experts apply different visual search strategies in problem-solving. Moreover, experts' visuocognitive processing benefits from stored chunks of mating constellations.

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Stable eye versus mouth preference in a live speech-processing task.

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Stable eye versus mouth preference in a live speech-processing task.

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