An Effect of Gaze Direction in Cocktail Party Listening.
Virginia Best, Alex D Boyd, Kamal Sen
PMID 36691678WHAT IT FOUND
Looking at the talker they were listening to improved digit recall among competing talkers in 10 young adults with normal hearing, even without lip-reading cues.
The benefit was not consistent across all positions.
Key findings
01Recall of digits from the target loudspeaker was better when participants looked at that loudspeaker.
02The gaze benefit was not consistent across every position; for side targets, looking at the centre was not significantly worse than looking at the target.
03About 90% of errors came from other loudspeakers in the mixture rather than random guesses.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
It tested only 10 young adults with normal hearing, so it does not show what happens in older adults, children, or people with hearing loss. The task was recalling digits from loudspeakers in a sound booth, not real conversation, lip-reading, or everyday listening. The benefit of looking at the talker was not consistent: for side targets, looking at the centre was not significantly worse than looking at the target. Eye tracking changed halfway through the study, from Pupil Core for five participants to Tobii Pro Glasses 3 for five participants. Six blocks were excluded because performance was at or below chance, and some trials had eye position more than 15° away from the cue. The authors reported a right-left asymmetry they could not explain.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. Funding came from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that patients with hearing loss should be told to look at the talker to improve speech understanding. The study tested 10 young adults with normal hearing recalling digits from a target loudspeaker among five loudspeakers, not conversational speech, and the benefit was not consistent across positions.