Pupil dilation reveals changes in listening effort due to energetic and informational masking

Woodcock, JS; Fazenda, BM; Cox, TJ; Davies, WJ

Abstract

Pupil dilation has previously been shown to be a useful involuntary marker of listening effort. An inverse relationship between pupil diameter and signal to noise ratio has been shown when speech is energetically masked by noise. The work reported here aimed to investigate whether this relationship also holds for informational masking. Informational masking is a concept used in soundscape research to represent the distraction from the target sound that comes from a masking sound that is also highly salient. To investigate the effect of informational masking on listening effort, eighteen normal-hearing participants completed a speech-in-noise task in which they were asked to identify words in short sentences presented in combination with four different types of masker (competing speech, speech modulated noise, and urban and nature soundscapes) at different levels of energetic masking set using a distortion weighted glimpse proportion model. Time varying pupil dilation was measured over the course of each sentence presentation. A repeated- measures ANOVA showed a significant main effect of both the level of energetic masking and the masker type on the mean pupil dilation (p < 0.05). These results suggest that pupil dilation reveals changes in listening effort due to both energetic and informational masking.

Citation

Woodcock, J., Fazenda, B., Cox, T., & Davies, W. (2019, September). Pupil dilation reveals changes in listening effort due to energetic and informational masking. Presented at ICA 2019, Aachen, Germany

• Presentation Conference Type: Other
• Conference Name: ICA 2019
• Conference Location: Aachen, Germany
• Start Date: Sep 9, 2019
• End Date: Sep 13, 2019
• Publication Date: Sep 12, 2019
• Deposit Date: Sep 18, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 20, 2019
• Book Title: Proceedings of the ICA 2019 AND EAA EUROREGIO 23rd International Congress on Acoustics, integrating 4th EAA Euroregio 2019
• ISBN: 9783939296157
• Publisher URL: http://pub.dega-akustik.de/ICA2019/data/articles/001252.pdf
• Related Public URLs: http://www.ica2019.org/technical-program/
• Additional Information: Event Type : Conference