TY - JOUR A1 - von Berg, Markus A1 - Himmelein, Hendrik A1 - Steffens, Jochen T1 - Effects of noise sensitivity and listening effort on perceptual ratings of background noise JF - JASA Express Letters N2 - Previous research suggests that noise sensitivity is related to inefficient auditory processing that might increase the mental load of noise and affect noise evaluation. This assumption was tested in an experiment using a dual-task paradigm with a visual primary task and an auditory secondary task. Results showed that participants' noise sensitivity was positively correlated with mental effort. Furthermore, mental effort mediated the effect of noise sensitivity on loudness and unpleasantness ratings. The results thus support the idea that noise sensitivity is related to increased mental effort and difficulties in filtering auditory information and that situational factors should be considered. KW - noise sensitivity KW - listening effort KW - Geräuschempfindlichkeit KW - Höranstrengung KW - HSD Publikationsfonds KW - DFG Publikationskosten Y1 - 2024 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:hbz:due62-opus-45747 SN - 2691-1191 N1 - Funding: Gefördert durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) – 532148125 und durch den zentralen Publikationsfonds der Hochschule Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. VL - 8 IS - 4 PB - AIP Publishing ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Himmelein, Hendrik A1 - von Berg, Markus A1 - Pörschmann, Christoph A1 - Steffens, Jochen T1 - Influence of mental effort on sound evaluations in virtual and real experimental environments JF - Frontiers in Virtual Reality N2 - Psychoacoustic research increasingly relies on virtual reality (VR) to account for the complexity of acoustic scenarios and enhance the ecological validity of laboratory findings. However, recent studies suggest that virtual environments can alter mental effort compared to real-world settings, for example, through increased perceptual complexity which in turn may affect auditory perception.This could bias experimental outcomes and compromise the ecological validity of studies conducted in VR. To investigate this, a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment was conducted to assess whether VR environments increase mental effort and thereby influence auditory perception. A real office environment was visually reconstructed in Unity and presented to the participants via a head-mounted display (HMD) and compared to its real counterpart. Participants in both environments were asked to retrospectively rate the loudness and unpleasantness of dynamically rendered binaural office noise scenarios presented via headphones and to report perceived sound sources. Moreover, participants were divided into two groups to induce different levels of mental effort. One group was asked to listen only to the sounds, while the other performed the Stroop Color-Word interference test in parallel. The results show no significant difference in the overall induced mental effort between environment conditions. Furthermore, performing the Stroop test had an effect on loudness and unpleasantness that was mediated by subjective effort. The results also suggest that auditory jugment depend primarily on individual sound properties, regardless of the visual environment. KW - Psychoakustik KW - Virtuelle Realität KW - Lautwahrnehmung KW - Head-mounted Display Y1 - 2025 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:hbz:due62-opus-57985 SN - 2673-4192 VL - 6 PB - Frontiers Media SA ER -