University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics
Abstract
Presented at the 21st International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2015), July 6-10, 2015, Graz, Styria, Austria.There is reason to believe that sound interacts with visual attention
mechanisms. Practical implications of that interaction have never
been analyzed in the context of spatial sound design for audiovisual
reproduction. The study reported here aimed to test if sound
spatialization could affect eye movements and the processing of visual
events in audiovisual scenes. We presented participants with
audiovisual scenes of a metro station. The sound was either mono,
stereo, or 3D. Participants wore eye tracking glasses during the
experiment and their task was to count how many people entered
the metro. In the divided attention task, participants had to count
people entering 3 doors of the metro. In the selective attention
task, participants had to count how many people entered the middle
door alone.
It was found that sound spatialization did not affect the divided attention
task. But in the selective attention task participants counted
less visual events with 3D sound. In that condition, the number
of eye fixations and time spent in the visual area of interest were
smaller. It is hypothesized that, in the case of divided attention,
the attention is already disengaged and fluctuating, which could
explain why sound did not have any additional effect. In the selective
attention task, participants must remain concentrated in only
one visual area and competing well-spatialized sounds in peripheral
areas might have a negative impact. These results should be
taken into consideration when designing sound spatialization algorithms
and soundtracks