Using Pupillometry in Virtual Reality as a Tool for Speech-in-Noise Research.
Hidde Pielage, Bethany Plain, Sjors van de Ven and 4 others
PMID 40600729WHAT IT FOUND
Pupil size measured inside a VR headset reliably tracked listening effort when the task got harder.
However, simple virtual avatars watching the patient failed to change performance or effort compared to being alone. This proves the tech works for effort, but not yet for social presence.
Key findings
01Peak pupil dilation increased significantly when participants had to attend to two sentences at once compared to one, confirming that VR-based eye tracking can detect changes in listening effort.
02The presence of virtual agents (copresence) did not significantly affect peak pupil dilation, baseline pupil size, or subjective ratings of effort and difficulty.
03Participants reported the virtual environment felt less real than in previous studies, with low scores for presence, which may explain why the social manipulation failed.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The virtual environment was very simple and did not feel realistic to participants, which likely prevented the social manipulation from working. The task load manipulation (listening to two sentences at once) is extreme and rare in daily life, so results may not generalize to typical conversation. The study was a proof-of-concept with a small sample size, and the feedback analysis was exploratory and underpowered.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The study was funded by the H2020 European Research Council and Oticon Fonden.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that VR cannot be used to study social listening effects. The failure here was likely due to the low realism of the specific virtual agents used, not the technology itself. More realistic environments may still succeed where this one did not.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →