Lukas Suveg, Au.D., Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Binaural Hearing and Speech Lab
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Influences of Spatial Separation and Audio-visual Spatial Congruence on Speech Target Unmasking and Certainty in Decision-making
Spatial separation of target and competing speech can improve the accuracy by which listeners, including those with bilateral cochlear implants (CIs), understand target speech. Even if measurement of this benefit were included in clinical evaluations, behavioral metrics like percent improvement on speech identification tasks are not designed to provide insight into the momentary accumulation of perceptual salience of auditory stimuli that informs the ultimate determination of the speech target. In two related studies, participants with typical hearing or bilateral CIs identified a speech target presented with a speech masker while their eye-gaze to objects in a “visual world” containing depictions of both acoustic stimuli was recorded. These studies were designed primarily to investigate the effects of target-masker spatial configuration and spatial congruence between the acoustic and visual stimuli on certainty in target identity. Eye gaze behaviors unfolding over the time course of target determination were measured along with time to decision and percent correct, to test the hypotheses that spatial separation of a target and masker, as well as audio-visual spatial congruence, would increase the certainty by which targets are identified.
This work was supported by NIH-NIDCD R01DC003083 and NIH-NIDCD R01DC020355 (awarded to Ruth Y. Litovsky), and NIH-NICHD U54 HD090256 (awarded to the Waisman Center)