Individual reactions to a multisensory immersive virtual environment: the impact of a wind farm on individuals

The aim of this study was to assess the impact of a wind farm on individuals by means of an audio-visual methodology that tried to simulate biologically plausible individual-environment interactions. To disentangle the effects of auditory and visual components on cognitive performances and subjective evaluations, unimodal (Audio or Video) and bimodal (Audio + Video) approaches were compared. Participants were assigned to three experimental conditions that reproduced a wind farm by means of an immersive virtual reality system: bimodal condition, reproducing scenarios with both acoustic and visual stimuli; unimodal visual condition, with only visual stimuli; unimodal auditory condition, with only auditory stimuli. While immersed in the virtual scenarios, participants performed tasks assessing verbal fluency, short-term verbal memory, backward counting, and distance estimations (egocentric: how far is the turbine from you?; allocentric: how far is the turbine from the target?). Afterwards, participants reported their degree of visual and noise annoyance. The results revealed that the presence of a visual scenario as compared to the only availability of auditory stimuli may exert a negative effect on resource-demanding cognitive tasks but a positive effect on perceived noise annoyance. This supports the idea that humans perceive the environment holistically and that auditory and visual features are processed in close interaction.