Effects of Personal Listening Device on Pedestrians' Acoustic Situation Awareness in a Virtual Reality Environment

Abstract

The technological developments for Personal Listening Devices (PLDs) have been staggering in the recent years; our listening experience has improved drastically but it has also affected our ability to remain cognizant of our acoustic environment. The student population remains the largest user group of PLDs. The distraction from PLDs can be dangerous in situations that require focused attention, such as crossing unsignalized crosswalks on college campuses. In this study, the researchers use a virtual reality (VR) based pedestrian simulator to task participants with crossing a replica campus street while listening to music through air and bone conduction PLDs. As a secondary task, participants were tasked with detecting and localizing (i.e., bi-directionally) a clearly audible ambulance siren during the crossing. It is hypothesized that there will be improved detection and localization performance with bone conduction PLDs, and that speech free music will be as distracting as music with speech. This study will also provide insights towards the use of PLDs as V2P communication interfaces during crosswalk situations.