Priority Programme “AUDICTIVE” (SPP 2236)
Deadline: 3. Juli 2023
In March 2019, the Senate of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) established the Priority Programme “Auditory Cognition in Interactive Virtual Environments – AUDICTIVE” (SPP 2236). The programme is designed to run for six years. After a successful first phase that started in January 2021, the present call invites proposals for the second three-year funding period.
Considerable progress has been made over the past years in the understanding of auditory cognitive processes and capabilities – from perception, attention and memory to complex performances such as scene analysis and communication. The first phase of “AUDICTIVE” focussed mostly on porting the well-controlled but often unrealistic stimulus presentations used in auditory cognition research to more comprehensive virtual or mixed reality environments. Here, recent developments in hardware and software technologies were reflected, with audiovisual virtual and mixed reality (VR, MR) reaching a high level of perceptual plausibility. In the first phase, the research in “AUDICTIVE” aimed at converting and/or applying interactive VR and/or MR technology to explore auditory cognition in audiovisual scenes that are closer to real life. With a variety of interactive virtual environment technologies and scenes, controlled research was conducted on how acoustic and visual components and further contextual factors affect perception, cognition and interaction. Here, we focused on the applicability and transfer of established paradigms from auditory cognition with rather simple audiovisual environments, significantly expanding beyond the basic approaches based on audio or visual perception that were previously used.
The results of the first phase have laid the foundation for the second phase of “AUDICTIVE”, which aims to identify or (further) develop suitable paradigms to use in more realistic scenes with the intention to elicit a close-to-natural perception, experience and/or behaviour.
Hence, in the second phase of “AUDICTIVE”, we seek to further expand the scientific level of knowledge, theories and models that have been developed within basic auditory perception and cognition research to even more realistic daily-life situations. Here, new knowledge, methods and techniques shall be generated (e.g., psychometric and cognitive assessment, QoE evaluation, physiological or behavioural analysis, signal acquisition and analysis, VR/MR technology enhancement) for richer and more complex scenarios, involving interactive VR and/or MR technology. This reflects the fact that virtual reality technology is continuing to mature, opening up new areas of application that include acoustics as a key component, such as immersive social MR (various parties being co-present in one environment); health-promoting measures through research on the effects of complex acoustic environments and/or noise (e.g., classroom, working environment); required training, therapy and/or rehabilitation (e.g., social anxiety, speech training after sudden hearing loss); assistive systems, possibly for user groups with special needs such as being hard of hearing (e.g., telepresence designed for the elderly).
