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

Woodcock, JS ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5654-5374, Fazenda, BM ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3912-0582, Cox, TJ ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4075-7564 and Davies, WJ ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5835-7489 2019, Pupil dilation reveals changes in listening effort due to energetic and informational masking , in: ICA 2019, 9 - 13 September 2019, Aachen, Germany.

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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.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Schools:	Schools > School of Computing, Science and Engineering > Salford Innovation Research Centre
Journal or Publication Title:	Proceedings of the 23rd International Congress on Acoustics, integrating 4th EAA Euroregio 2019
Publisher:	Deutsche Gesellschaft für Akustik e.V. (DEGA)
ISBN:	9783939296157
ISSN:	2226-7808
Related URLs:	Publication
Funders:	Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
Depositing User:	W. J. Davies
Date Deposited:	18 Sep 2019 14:10
Last Modified:	16 Feb 2022 02:42
URI:	https://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/52413

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