Speaker
Description
Understanding everyday hearing requires approaches that go beyond traditional laboratory experiments with isolated sounds. This plenary introduces interactive audiovisual virtual reality (VR) as a methodology to “bring real life into the lab” and to study perception, attention, memory, and communication in complex, yet experimentally controlled environments. VR can recreate realistic acoustic scenes while allowing for systematic manipulation. However, it also has limitations, such as reduced social and situational context, which must be carefully considered.This talk will highlight the general principles that emerge when auditory and visual information are combined in such environments. Visual cues have been found not to automatically improve listening; their benefit appears to depend on task demands, the difficulty of the acoustic scene, and the need to integrate information across modalities. Overall, VR will be discussed as a tool for investigating these often nonintuitive interactions between seeing and hearing and for linking controlled experimentation with ecologically meaningful listening situations.These developments point toward a future in which hearing is studied within interdisciplinary frameworks that embed auditory perception and processing in rich, audiovisual VR environments. These approaches draw on expertise from acoustics, psychology, and computer science to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of human multimodal perception.