Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London
We’re currently looking for people to take part in a short experiment on auditory attention which involves sitting at a computer for about 10 mins and responding to sounds played over headphones. We can pay participants £2 for taking part.
If you’re interested in taking part, or would like to know more, please get in touch.
Last Saturday’s Science Open Day was a great success – as well as being a generally fun day, an incredible number of visitors came along, which meant we were able to run our binaural listening experiment continuously all day. We very much enjoyed talking to people about their reactions to the experiment and the binaural recordings, and would like to thank everyone who took part. We’re now looking forward to analysing all the data we collected on Saturday.
This week we’ve been recording a lot of sounds using a recording technique known as “binaural recording” or, more specifically, “dummy head recording”. This involves using an acoustically realistic dummy head with microphones in its ears to produce recordings which, when listened to on headphones, convey an extremely realistic sense of space – often creating the illusion that the sound is actually in the room around the listener. This is because the acoustics of the head and especially the ears play very important roles in allowing us to derive spatial information from the sound that we hear – information which is lost with most ordinary recording techniques.
To hear an example of what these recordings sound like, try listening to this with headphones:
[audio:https://attentionlab.psychologyresearch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/binaural-demo-1.mp3|titles=Binaural Demo 1]
(Sounds in this example: jangling keys, rustling bags, fake motorbike engine)
The primary purpose of the recordings that we’re making is for an experiment / activity that we’re planning to run at the Science Open Day here at Royal Holloway on the 27th February, but if that goes well we’re hoping to use them subsequently in a range of auditory attention-related experiments.
Our plans to investigate the cognitive demands imposed by satnav systems have recently been reported in a number of news sources, including The Press Association, The Telegraph, and The Independent.
The research is currently underway and we will post the results as soon as they are in.
We’re currently looking for people who have some experience of using an in-car satnav system to take part in two short studies, taking about 30 mins in total. One is a questionnaire about satnav usage. The other is a short experiment on auditory attention and involves sitting at a computer for about 10 mins and responding to sounds played over headphones. We can pay participants £5 for taking part.
If you’re interested in taking part, or would like to know more, please get in touch.
Two undergraduate projects are currently running in the lab:
Please contact us if you’re interested in taking part in either experiment.
This is the new Attention Lab website.
From here you can find out more about us, get in touch with us and get copies of our publications. We’re planning to keep the site updated with information about our ongoing research for anyone who might be interested in taking part in one of our experiments.
Please have a look around the new site, and if you have any comments we’d love to know what you think.