Banca de DEFESA: LUCIANA DA ROCHA ALVES

Uma banca de DEFESA de DOUTORADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : LUCIANA DA ROCHA ALVES
DATE: 17/07/2023
TIME: 10:00
LOCAL: remoto
TITLE:

EVALUATION OF RESIDUAL NOISE INTERFERENCE ON COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE OF CLASSROOM USER IN VIRTUAL REALITY 

KEY WORDS:

Acoustic virtual reality, user sound perception test, subjective acoustics, classrooms in Brazil. 

PAGES: 150
BIG AREA: Ciências Sociais Aplicadas
AREA: Arquitetura e Urbanismo
SUMMARY:

Many of the activities performed by human beings require a certain degree of attention and concentration that can be influenced by the environment where they are. The acoustics of an environment, whether insulation or room acoustic, can interfere with the cognitive performance of people, influencing their success in activities that require more concentration. The classroom is an example of an environment that, among other characteristics, must have adequate acoustics to provide students with a satisfactory environment for teaching-learning functions. Several studies indicate that the teaching-learning process can be impaired by unsatisfactory classroom acoustics, which deteriorates the students' understanding of the teacher's speech, besides causing physiological effects, such as stress and fatigue. In Brazil, attention to the acoustic treatment of classrooms can be considered recent and still not very extensive, and its importance may not be perceived even by students who have never studied in a classroom with proper acoustics, therefore the classroom was used for the application of this research. The general objective of this thesis is to evaluate the interference of external noise under different room acoustic conditions on the cognitive performance of classroom users. The specific objectives can be listed as: 1 - To analyze the room acoustics of a real classroom through measurements and simulations to support auralizations in different sound conditions; 2 - To evaluate, in a virtual reality environment, the influence of different levels of sound insulation and room acoustics on student attention through auralizations; 3 - To evaluate the interference of different types of noises, common in educational spaces, on the user's level of attention, in the virtual environment; and 4 - To compare the results obtained through cognitive tests with the subjective perception of the participants. The present research addresses a quali-quantitative study, whose methodological procedures involve acoustic measurements and simulations, auralizations, creation of virtual reality environment, application of serial recall test and statistical analysis with hypothesis testing. A pilot study was conducted in a virtual reality environment, with five different acoustic conditions, to evaluate the influence of noise on users regarding these conditions through a cognitive performance test. Acoustic insulation and conditioning were simulated in two conditions, one being satisfactory and one unsatisfactory for each of the parameters. These conditions were combined with each other in the auralization process, in addition to the "silent" condition, whose audio reproduced pink noise in order to mask possible intrusive noises from the real environment. The pilot study was conducted in Germany (n=16) and replicated as an object experiment in Brazil with another group of participants (n=17) using traffic noise as the residual noise for the test. The results of this study indicate that there was a high variability in the hit rate among participants in all conditions, who had similar mean hits among themselves. Factors of fatigue and response time to the experiment were evaluated, and were not shown to have a trend in behavior according to the order in which the test was taken. One factor observed in the study was the importance of varying the audio recording so that cyclic repetition does not condition the participant to predict sound events, a situation that would not happen in a real situation. Thus, a new test, this time conducted with conversational noise, considered a longer duration recording. The results of this test (n=44) also presented similar averages between the acoustic conditions. However, it was possible to observe variations in the set of results in each of these conditions, indicating that residual conversation noise influences cognitive performance more when isolation is poor, since hit rates were lower in these conditions. Room acoustic also indicated influences, so that the results of the hit rates were higher with the test under conversational noise when the sound was unintelligible. Considering only the experiments conducted in Brazil, the results of both tests under different types of noise were compared with each other, resulting in a greater interference of conversation noise on the cognitive performance of users compared to traffic noise. 

 

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Externo à Instituição - MICHAEL VORLÄNDER - RWTH
Externo ao Programa - 3087032 - ALEXANDRE VIRGINELLI MAIORINO - UFRNPresidente - 3549781 - BIANCA CARLA DANTAS DE ARAUJO
Externa à Instituição - RANNY LOUREIRO XAVIER NASCIMENTO MICHALSKI - USP
Interna - 347627 - VIRGINIA MARIA DANTAS DE ARAUJO
Externa à Instituição - VIVIANE SUZEY GOMES DE MELO - UFSM