Short-term cognitive fatigue of spatial selective attention after face-to-face conversations in virtual noisy environments

2025-09-11

AI Summary

This study investigates short-term cognitive fatigue effects on spatial selective attention induced by authentic two-person dialogue in a virtual noisy environment. Employing a high-ecological-validity VR cocktail-party paradigm, binaural auditory stimuli, subjective fatigue scales, and a multi-timepoint repeated-measures design, we compared auditory attention task performance before and after dialogue exposure. Contrary to the classical “cognitive resource depletion” hypothesis, results revealed significantly faster response times and stable accuracy post-dialogue—despite marked increases in subjective effort and fatigue. These findings indicate rapid adaptive training effects rather than performance degradation. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration within an ecologically valid, interactive two-person context that cognitive fatigue need not impair attentional performance and may instead trigger immediate behavioral optimization. The results provide novel empirical evidence for auditory cognitive load theory and inform fatigue modeling in human–computer interaction systems.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Adaptive Behavior
• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods

Abstract

Spatial selective attention is an important asset for communication in cocktail party situations but may be compromised by short-term cognitive fatigue. Here we tested whether an effortful conversation in a highly ecological setting depletes task performance in an auditory spatial selective attention task. Young participants with normal hearing performed the task before and after (1) having a real dyadic face-to-face conversation on a free topic in a virtual reverberant room with simulated interfering conversations and background babble noise at 72 dB SPL for 30 minutes, (2) passively listening to the interfering conversations and babble noise, or (3) having the conversation in quiet. Self-reported perceived effort and fatigue increased after conversations in noise and passive listening relative to the reports after conversations in quiet. In contrast to our expectations, response times in the attention task decreased, rather than increased, after conversation in noise and accuracy did not change systematically in any of the conditions on the group level. Unexpectedly, we observed strong training effects between the individual sessions in our within-subject design even after one hour of training on a different day.

Problem

• Investigating cognitive fatigue effects on spatial attention after conversations
• Testing if noisy conversations impair auditory selective attention performance
• Examining training effects on attention tasks in within-subject designs

Innovation

• Virtual reality conversation testing
• Auditory spatial attention measurement
• Within-subject training effect analysis