Audio-visual interactions in environment assessment.

Area of Science:

• Environmental Psychology
• Acoustics
• Human-Computer Interaction

Background:

• Assessing environmental comfort is crucial for urban planning and well-being.
• Understanding the interplay of sensory information in environmental perception is key.
• Previous research often focuses on individual sensory modalities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how visual and audio information jointly influence the assessment of audio-visual environments.
• To determine the impact of different sensory conditions on perceived environmental comfort.
• To explore the role of sound sources and sound levels in differentiating environmental representations.

Main Methods:

• Conducted psychophysical experiments using original audio-visual recordings from seven urban locations in Poznań.
• Participants rated their perceived comfort on a standardized scale under four conditions: audio only, audio-visual, video only, and mixed audio-visual.
• Analyzed comfort assessments across different sensory input conditions.

Main Results:

• A significant difference in comfort assessment was observed across the investigated conditions for some samples.
• Adding visual information improved comfort assessment in three out of seven cases when comparing audio-only to audio-visual conditions.
• Manipulating the audio component of audio-visual samples had a greater effect on comfort assessment than manipulating the video component.
• Perception of audio-visual environments was differentiated based on sound source composition rather than sound level.

Conclusions:

• Sensory integration, particularly the manipulation of audio elements, plays a significant role in audio-visual environmental comfort.
• Object identification within soundscapes and landscapes contributes to environmental grouping and perception.
• Future research should consider the nuanced impact of specific audio-visual elements on perceived comfort.