Levy Orel, Korisky Adi, Zvilichovsky Yair, Zion Golumbic Elana
Bar-Ilan University.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2025 Feb 1;37(2):300-316. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_02249.
Many real-life situations can be extremely noisy, which makes it difficult to understand what people say. Here, we introduce a novel audiovisual virtual reality experimental platform to study the behavioral and neurophysiological consequences of background noise on processing continuous speech in highly realistic environments. We focus on a context where the ability to understand speech is particularly important: the classroom. Participants (n = 32) experienced sitting in a virtual reality classroom and were told to pay attention to a virtual teacher giving a lecture. Trials were either quiet or contained background construction noise, emitted from outside the classroom window. Two realistic types of noise were used: continuous drilling and intermittent air hammers. Alongside behavioral outcomes, we measured several neurophysiological metrics, including neural activity (EEG), eye-gaze and skin conductance (galvanic skin response). Our results confirm the detrimental effect of background noise. Construction noise, and particularly intermittent noise, was associated with reduced behavioral performance, reduced neural tracking of the teacher's speech and an increase in skin conductance, although it did not have a significant effect on alpha-band oscillations or eye-gaze patterns. These results demonstrate the neurophysiological costs of learning in noisy environments and emphasize the role of temporal dynamics in speech-in-noise perception. The finding that intermittent noise was more disruptive than continuous noise supports a "habituation" rather than "glimpsing" hypothesis of speech-in-noise processing. These results also underscore the importance of increasing the ecologically relevance of neuroscientific research and considering acoustic, temporal, and semantic features of realistic stimuli as well as the cognitive demands of real-life environments.
许多现实生活中的场景可能极其嘈杂，这使得理解人们所说的话变得困难。在此，我们引入了一个新颖的视听虚拟现实实验平台，以研究在高度逼真的环境中背景噪声对连续语音处理的行为和神经生理影响。我们关注的是一个理解语音能力尤为重要的场景：教室。参与者（n = 32）体验坐在虚拟现实教室中，并被告知要注意一位虚拟教师讲课。试验分为安静环境或包含从教室窗外发出的背景施工噪声的环境。使用了两种逼真的噪声类型：持续钻孔声和间歇性气锤声。除了行为结果外，我们还测量了几个神经生理指标，包括神经活动（脑电图）、目光注视和皮肤电导率（皮肤电反应）。我们的结果证实了背景噪声的有害影响。施工噪声，尤其是间歇性噪声，与行为表现下降、对教师语音的神经跟踪减少以及皮肤电导率增加有关，尽管它对阿尔法波段振荡或目光注视模式没有显著影响。这些结果证明了在嘈杂环境中学习的神经生理成本，并强调了时间动态在噪声语音感知中的作用。间歇性噪声比持续性噪声更具干扰性这一发现支持了噪声语音处理的“习惯化”而非“瞥见”假说。这些结果还强调了提高神经科学研究的生态相关性以及考虑现实刺激的声学、时间和语义特征以及现实生活环境的认知需求的重要性。
