Concurrent talking in immersive virtual reality: on the dominance of visual speech cues.

ABSTRACT: Humans are good at selectively listening to specific target conversations, even in the presence of multiple concurrent speakers. In our research, we study how auditory-visual cues modulate this selective listening. We do so by using immersive Virtual Reality technologies with spatialized audio. Exposing 32 participants to an Information Masking Task with concurrent speakers, we find significantly more errors in the decision-making processes triggered by asynchronous audiovisual speech cues. More precisely, the results show that lips on the Target speaker matched to a secondary (Mask) speaker's audio severely increase the participants' comprehension error rates. In a control experiment (n = 20), we further explore the influences of the visual modality over auditory selective attention. The

SUBMITTER: Gonzalez-Franco M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5476615 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature