Auditory spatial attention after dyadic conversation in a cocktail party situation

Is auditory spatial attention susceptible to short-term fatigue from effortful communication in noise? We hypothesize that people lose spatial attention after effortful communication in noisy environments. In the current experiment, normal-hearing participants had a free 30-min face-to-face conversation with a fellow participant in the laboratory. Headphones, microphones, and motion tracking provided world-stable virtual acoustic space, while preserving the direct sound. Before and after the conversation, participants conducted a test of auditory spatial attention made of a syllable streaming task. In the task, participants heard two streams of syllables from the left and the right. Possible syllables were: “ba,” “da,” and “ga” spoken by a male and a female talker. The task was to repeat the syllables from the target stream denoted by a prior auditory spatial cue. Data were analyzed as a change in spatial auditory attention from the pre- to post-test. The experimental condition with the conversation was compared to the control conditions with no conversation, or no noise. The goal of the study is to understand the effect of listening effort and short-term cognitive fatigue on attention control and provide ecologically valid tools for the assessment of cognitive function within acoustic scenes.