Effects of auditory distance cues and reverberation on spatial perception and listening strategies

Spatial hearing, the brain's ability to use auditory cues to identify the origin of sounds, is crucial for everyday listening. While simplified paradigms have advanced the understanding of spatial hearing, their lack of ecological validity limits their applicability to real-life conditions. This study aims to address this gap by investigating the effects of listener movement, reverberation, and distance on localisation accuracy in a more ecologically valid context. Participants performed active localisation tasks with no specific instructions on listening strategy, in either anechoic or reverberant conditions. The results indicate that the head movements were more frequent in reverberant environments, suggesting an adaptive strategy to mitigate uncertainty in binaural cues due to reverberation. While distance did not affect the listening strategy, it influenced the localisation performance. Our outcomes suggest that listening behaviour is adapted depending on the current acoustic conditions to support an effective perception of the space.

End-to-End Models for the Analysis of Pupil Size Variations and Diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease

It is well known that a systematic analysis of the pupil size variations, recorded by means of an eye-tracker, is a rich source of information about a subject's cognitive state. In this work we present end-to-end models for the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (PD) based on the raw pupil size signal. Long-range registration (10 minutes) of the pupil size were collected in scotopic conditions (complete darkness, 0 lux) on 21 healthy subjects and 15 subjects diagnosed with PD. 1-D convolutional neural network models are trained for classification of short-range sequences (10 to 60 seconds of registration). The model provides prediction with high average accuracy on a hold out test set. A temporal analysis of the model performance allowed the characterization of pupil's size variations in PD and healthy subjects during a resting state. Dataset and codes are released for reproducibility and benchmarking purposes.