Biology subjects

Shiell, M. M.

Publications and source records attributed to Shiell, M. M..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Physiological Markers of Auditory Situational Awareness in Complex Spatialised Scenes

Detecting changes in acoustic environments is essential for situational awareness. It remains unclear whether the spatial location of such changes modulates automatic orienting and arousal mechanisms. We measured pupil dilation, pupil dilation rate, and microsaccade rate while listeners (n=25) heard complex, spatialized auditory scenes rendered over headphones using individualized HRTFs. Participants were naive to the critical manipulation: the appearance of a new source from one of five locations: front, left, right, back, or above. A subsequent localization task assessed perceptual spatial uncertainty. Behaviorally-irrelevant source appearances elicited a cascade of ocular responses. Microsaccadic inhibition emerged from [~]85ms after change onset, and was broadly comparable across locations, suggesting a location-invariant early orienting response to auditory change. Pupil dilation rate increased from [~]200ms, followed by a phasic pupil dilation response from [~]400ms, indicating engagement of arousal-related systems. Pupil responses were modulated by source location: changes from front/left/right elicited larger dilation than changes from above, with back responses showing a similar but weaker reduction. Behavioral localization revealed substantial confusion for front/back/above locations. However, this did not mirror the physiological data, as front sources elicited pupil responses comparable to lateral sources. These findings demonstrate that complex auditory scene changes recruit oculomotor and autonomic systems even outside the focus of task relevance. They further suggest a dissociation between early, location-invariant attentional capture indexed by microsaccadic inhibition and later, location-sensitive arousal indexed by pupil dilation. Spatial biases in auditory situational awareness therefore appear to emerge after initial change detection, shaping arousal and behavioral performance rather than the earliest orienting response.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Spatial auditory change detection in listeners with hearing loss

Everyday listening relies on the auditory systems ability to automatically monitor the background soundscape and detect new or changing sources. Although change detection is a fundamental aspect of situational awareness, little is known about how hearing impairment affects this ability. This study examined how sensorineural hearing loss influences spatial auditory change detection. Older hearing-impaired listeners (N = 30) completed a spatial change detection task requiring them to identify the appearance of a new sound source within a complex spatialised acoustic scene. Hearing loss was characterised by three factors that were measured with standard clinical tests: audiometric hearing thresholds, sensitivity to small level changes, and sensitivity to spectrotemporal modulation. Simple and mixed-effects linear models were used to test how these factors predicted reaction time, hit rate, and false alarm rate. Listeners with poorer spectrotemporal sensitivity, higher audiometric hearing thresholds, and older age showed slower and less accurate detection, whereas sensitivity to small changes in level did not predict outcomes. Detection also varied with spatial location, where appearing sources from behind were detected more slowly and less accurately than those from the front or sides. Numerical analysis using head-related transfer functions confirmed that these rear-field effects were unlikely to be explained by overall or frequency-specific acoustic level differences. These findings reveal that hearing loss, age, and spatial factors jointly shape listeners ability to monitor dynamic auditory scenes. Additionally, testing spectrotemporal sensitivity offers a promising clinical measure of non-speech auditory processing with relevance for hearing-aid fitting and situational awareness.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Multilevel Modelling of Gaze from Hearing-impaired Listeners following a Realistic Conversation

PurposeThere is a need for outcome measures that predict real-world communication abilities in hearing-impaired people. We outline a potential method for this and use it to answer the question of when, and how much, hearing-impaired listeners look towards a new talker in a conversation. MethodTwenty-two older hearing-impaired adults followed a pre-recorded two-person audiovisual conversation in the presence of babble noise. We compared their eye-gaze direction to the conversation in two multilevel logistic regression (MLR) analyses. First, we split the conversation into events classified by the number of active talkers within a turn or a transition, and we tested if these predicted the listeners gaze. Second, we mapped the odds that a listener gazed towards a new talker over time during a conversation transition. ResultsWe found no evidence that our conversation events predicted changes in the listeners gaze, but the listeners gaze towards the new talker during a silent-transition was predicted by time: The odds of looking at the new talker increased in an s-shaped curve from at least 0.4 seconds before to 1 second after the onset of the new talkers speech. A comparison of models with different random effects indicated that more variance was explained by differences between individual conversation events than by differences between individual listeners. ConclusionMLR modelling of eye-gaze during talker transitions is a promising approach to study a listeners perception of realistic conversation. Our experience provides insight to guide future research with this method.

neuroscience↗