Schedule of Events | Symposia

The impact of realistic background noises on neurophysiological responses to speech, in a Virtual-Reality classroom

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Orel Levy¹, Shirley Hackmon¹, Yair Zvilichovsky¹, Adi Korisky¹, Elana Zion-Golumbic¹; ¹Bar-Ilan University

Speech comprehension in real-life situations can be challenging due to the presence of irrelevant sounds or background noise. Here, Using Virtual Reality (VR), we studied how different types of realistic sounds and background noises affect neural processing of speech and ongoing ocular and physiological responses in an ecologically relevant audiovisual setting: the classroom. We measured neural activity (EEG), eye-gaze patterns, and galvanic skin response (GSR) while participants listened to mini-lectures in a VR-classroom. We examined the impact of continuous versus intermittent construction noise (Exp.1) and occasional transient sounds like phone ringtones (Exp.2), comparing responses in adults with ADHD and controls. Our findings indicate that intermittent noise reduced neural speech tracking accuracy, increased physiological arousal, and lowered behavioral performance, while continuous noise did not affect these measures (Exp.1). Transient sounds (Exp.2) elicited neural ERPs and increased physiological arousal in both groups, with the ADHD group showing larger early N1 neural responses and reduced neural tracking of speech. Spontaneous eye-gaze patterns and neural alpha-power were unaffected by experimental conditions but explained some variance in ADHD symptoms. The novel VR experimental platform contributes to our understanding of how noise influences speech processing in realistic settings, showing that not all types of background noise disrupt equally and emphasizing the increased sensitivity to distraction in ADHD. While far from exhaustive, this work demonstrates the importance of studying speech-in-noise processing in increasingly real-life contexts, integrating neural, ocular, and physiological measures to create a more well-rounded description of listeners multifaceted response profile to speech in noisy environments.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Auditory