A Comparison of Gender Differences and Performance Metrics in a VR-Based Auditory Selective Task

Virtual Reality has gained significant interest with the advancement of display and processing technologies in recent years. Traditionally, visual stimuli were the main point of interest in the development of new VR applications. However, audio is also key to the success of such experiences. Audio technology is responsible for making the VR environment more immersive as it is directly correlated with how we perceive the world. Our real-world environments are multimodal and multisensory. In this work, we investigate the effect of two types of distractors in an auditory selective attention task. Users were immersed in a virtual classroom with spatialised audio enabled. The task itself was divided into two subtasks. First, participants had to identify different types of auditory and audiovisual stimuli in the scene. Second, they had to focus their attention on a speaker in front of them and identify a keyword from the story each time they heard it. Furthermore, participants were divided into three groups that differ on when the distractor is presented in the second subtask: (a) before, (b) same time, and (c) after the keyword. Findings from this study show that there are significant gender differences for listeners immersed in an environment with competing sounds in recalling a story. Moreover, the time when distractors are presented significantly affected the response time, being inversely proportional to the mean response time.