Jona Schebesta

 Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience | Bachelor Psychology 

"Investigating Relative Distance, Azimuth and Separation Effects in Realistic Reverberant Multi-Talker Situations"

Jona's elevator pitch
The Cocktail-Party Effect describes a phenomenon that we focus on listening to a conversation partner, while other people are simultaneously talking. Several types of acoustic cues may help us to filter out the relevant stream of speech. We investigated the joint effects of binaural cues, distance-related cues, and room acoustics (i.e., reverberation) on this phenomenon and made significant findings. The results suggest that distance-related cues are only helpful when binaural cues are mostly absent. Moreover, different attentional strategies appear to be adopted depending on the talker positions. However, these strategies seem to be differently robust to increasing level of reverberation.