Evaluation of a Child-Appropriate Localization Paradigm
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Virtual acoustic environments presented over headphones are nowadays commonly used in acoustic experiments, including for children. These often utilize non-individual head-related transfer functions (HRTFs), for instance from artificial heads, that are known from experiments with adults to affect, among other factors, the localization accuracy. While objective, including model-based evaluation metrics of child and adult HRTFs show comparable dissimilarities with artificial-head HRTFs, subjective evaluations to validate these findings have yet to be done with children. To be able to evaluate how the effects on non-individual HRTFs manifest in children, an age appropriate 3D-pointing paradigm was designed and implemented. The experimental design allows evaluation of lateralization as well as elevation accuracy using in-situ measured individual HRTFs from a 68-channel spherical cap loudspeaker array in anechoic conditions. To validate the paradigm, an experiment using adult participants was performed. These results along the paradigm details are presented.