Measuring communication difficulty with gaze behavior and head movement (en)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
In hearing rehabilitation for the development of intervention strategies, it is of utmost importance to be able to assess a person’s real-life communication ability to optimize the rehabilitation process. We investigated the behavior of gaze in challenging communication conditions due to environmental noise or talkers’ sensory deficit.Pairs of old participants with normal hearing, who were unknown to each other, held a conversation in different hearing conditions with either normal hearing or simulated hearing loss (with earplugs) without noise. They also conversed in two levels of multi-talker babble noise of 60 and 70 dBA in the normal hearing status. Conversations between pairs were elicited using a Diapix task (spot-the-difference), i.e., the interlocutors had pictures of the same scene (beach, farm, or city) that had some differences in the details. The talkers’ gaze behavior between their own picture and the conversation partner, defined as regions of interest (ROIs), was analyzed. The results show that the number of saccades between ROIs increased due to both higher background noise level and loss of hearing sensitivity. This finding means that changing behavior during challenging conditions can facilitate interaction with an interlocutor. The potential for using saccades as a measure of communication difficulty is discussed.