Asymmetric Performance in the Cocktail Party Effect: Implications for the Design of Spatial Audio Displays

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to determine the extent to which hemispheric specialization is manifested in the performance of tasks in which listeners are required to attend to one of several simultaneously spoken speech communications. Speech intelligibility and response time were measured under factorial combinations of the number of simultaneous talkers, the target talker hemifield, and the spatial arrangement of talkers. Intelligibility was found to be mediated by all of the independent variables. Results are discussed in terms of the design of adaptive spatial audio interfaces for speech communications. Actual or potential applications of this research include the design of adaptive spatial audio interfaces for speech communications.

The role of spatial location in auditory search

“…Although previous studies have not examined the effect of spatial separation as a function of exposure time, most have reported some beneficial effects of spatial separation using stimulus presentation durations of several seconds (Bolia et al, 2001;Kidd et al, 2005;McAnally and Martin, 2007). The effects observed in these studies may reflect a process occurring after stream segregation, such as enhanced selection of already-formed streams, resulting in a release from informational masking.…”

“…Although there is increasing evidence that spatial separation of sound sources can improve listeners' ability to monitor individual streams within complex auditory displays (Bolia et al, 2001;McAnally and Martin, 2007;Nelson et al, 1999), nearly all previous studies have required listeners to monitor speech messages over a period of time. The issue of spatial effects on listening in multi-talker environments is important with regard to designing effective auditory displays for communication.…”

Gender in the Cocktail Party Effect: Listener, Target Speaker, and Distractor Genders Examined

“…The speech stimuli used in these experiments were drawn from the modified version of the Coordinate Response Meeting --2002 PROCEEDINGS of the HUMAN FACTORS AND ERGONOMICS SOCIETY 46th ANNUAL MEETING --2002 Measure described and distributed by Bolia and his colleagues (Bolia, Nelson, Ericson & Simpson, 2000). The phrases in this speech corpus consist of a call sign and a color-number combination embedded in a carrier phrase.…”

Simple Displays of Talker Location Improve Voice Identification Performance in Multitalker, Spatialized Audio Environments

“…In prior research, the CRM was used to examine listeners' ability first to perceive a particular target call sign (e.g., "Baron") within a stimulus phrase and then to report the color and number content of the stimulus (e.g., "Blue, 7;" Best, Ihlefeld, & Shinn-Cunningham, 2005;Bolia, 2001;Brungart, Kordik, & Simpson, 2005;Brungart & Simpson, 2003;Kidd et al, 2005;Nelson et al, 1999). In this current set of experiments, the conventional CRM corpus was extended by assigning each of the eight talkers within the CRM corpus his or her own name.…”

“…Unwanted noise is a common problem particularly in collaborative auditory environments, which suffer not only from limited bandwidth and transmission-related noise but also from noise caused by end-user equipment, such as low-quality hardware or improperly used microphones (Watson & Sasse, 2000). Spatializing voices also increases speech intelligibility when listeners are faced with the classic "cocktail party problem" (Cherry, 1953) of attending to the informational content of one voice despite the presence of multiple simultaneous distracters (Abouchacra, 2001;Bolia, 2001;Drullman & Bronkhorst, 2000).…”