Incorporating Virtual Reality Agents During a Dichotic Speech Reception Task: Insights From the Heart.
Bethany Plain, Hidde Pielage, Adriana A Zekveld and 4 others
PMID 39565283WHAT IT FOUND
Virtual reality agents giving feedback did not increase listening effort or improve speech recognition compared to static objects.
Participants reported higher effort and lower performance when repeating two sentences simultaneously versus one, confirming that divided attention increases cognitive load regardless of social context.
Key findings
01The presence of virtual agents providing feedback did not significantly change speech recognition performance or subjective ratings of effort compared to non-agent controls.
02Participants performed significantly worse and reported higher effort and difficulty when asked to repeat two sentences simultaneously (dual-sentence) compared to focusing on one (single-sentence).
03Heart rate reactivity was unexpectedly higher in the non-agent control conditions compared to the agent conditions, though this did not align with other physiological or performance measures.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample consisted only of young, normal-hearing adults, so findings may not apply to older adults or those with hearing loss. The virtual agents were rated by participants as unrealistic and robotic, which may have reduced their ability to evoke genuine social-evaluative threat. The study was underpowered for some cardiovascular analyses due to data exclusions, and the unexpected heart rate findings were isolated and not supported by other physiological measures.
Declared interests
Funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie-Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 765329. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that virtual reality agents are ineffective for assessing listening effort. The agents in this study were perceived as unrealistic, which may have prevented them from eliciting the intended social-evaluative response. The lack of effect may be due to the poor quality of the social simulation rather than the concept itself.