Listening Effort in Complex Audiovisual Scenes Under Varying Simulated Room Acoustic Conditions.

All participants were young (18–33) with normal hearing, so the findings cannot be generalised to older adults or people with hearing impairment, who are the populations most affected by reverberation in daily life. The two reverberant conditions (T30 = 0.5 s and 1.0 s) showed no difference on any measure; the authors acknowledge the sample size (N = 30) may have been too small to detect a small effect between these two conditions. The anechoic free-field condition is artificial – no real room has zero reverberation – so the comparison is between an ideal and realistic conditions rather than between two realistic room conditions. The signal-to-noise ratio was not held constant across conditions (approximately 3 dB in anechoic and treated, 1.5 dB in untreated), which complicates attributing all differences to reverberation alone. The VR environment, while more realistic than audio-only labs, still involved static virtual humans, a hearing booth, and headphones, limiting ecological validity. The vibrotactile secondary task had no visual representation in the VR scene, which may have disrupted the virtual environment and affected task prioritisation.

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), project 444724862. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

Do not read this as evidence that reducing office reverberation from 1.0 s to 0.5 s will improve a patient's listening or memory – the study found no significant difference between these two conditions on any measure. The only significant comparisons were between the artificial anechoic condition and both reverberant offices, and the signal-to-noise ratio also differed across conditions (approximately 3 dB in anechoic and treated, 1.5 dB in untreated), so the effect cannot be attributed to reverberation alone.