Abstract
It is unclear whether the brain handles auditory cues similarly to visual cues for balance. We investigated the influence of headphones and loudspeaker reproduction of sounds on dynamic balance performance when an individual is facing a cognitive challenge. Twenty participants (16 females, aged 19–36) were asked to avoid a ball according to a specific visual rule. Visuals were projected from the HTC Vive head-mounted display in an acoustically controlled space. We varied the environment by adding congruent sounds (sounds coincide with the visual rule) or incongruent sounds (sounds may or may not coincide with the visual rule) as well as creating a multimodal (visual and congruent sounds) vs. unimodal (visual or congruent sounds only) display of stimuli. Sounds were played over headphones or loudspeakers. We quantified reaction time (RT) and accuracy (choosing the correct direction to move) by capturing the head movement. We found that in the absence of sounds, RT was slower with headphones compared to loudspeakers, but the introduction of either congruent or incongruent sounds resulted in faster movements with headphones such that RT was no longer different between apparatus. Participants used congruent sounds to improve accuracy but disregarded incongruent sounds. This suggests that selective attention may explain how sounds are incorporated into dynamic balance performance in healthy young adults. Participants leveraged sounds played over loudspeakers, but not over headphones, to enhance accuracy in a unimodal dark environment. This may be explained by the natural listening conditions created by loudspeakers where sounds may be perceived as externalized.
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Data availability
The complete dataset can be found at: Lubetzky, Anat (2023), “Type of Auditory cues and Apparatus influence how Healthy Young Adults Integrate Sounds for Dynamic Balance”, Mendeley Data, V1, doi: https://doi.org/10.17632/5h9pwh5zyp.1https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/5h9pwh5zyp/1.
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks are extended to Zhu Wang, PhD, Postdoctoral fellow, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, for the development of the original Simulation App. Their contributions were invaluable and greatly appreciated.
Funding
This study was funded by the NYU MARL (Music and Audio Research Lab) seed award. The sponsors had no role in the study design, collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; or in the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.
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AL: Study design and conceptualization, methodology, funding, data collection, project administration, supervision, data analysis, writing-original draft, writing- review and editing. AR: Study design and conceptualization, methodology, funding, project administration, resources, supervision, writing- review and editing. DH-Funding, data analysis, visualization, writing- review and editing. LA-data collection, writing- original draft, writing- review and editing. YW- Software and system design, data collection, writing- review and editing. AO-Software and system design, writing- review and editing. DL-Software and system design, data collection, writing- review and editing.
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The study was approved by the New York University Human Ethics Institutional Review Board and was therefore performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Communicated by Francesco Lacquaniti.
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Arie, L., Roginska, A., Wu, Y. et al. Type of auditory cues and apparatus influence how healthy young adults integrate sounds for dynamic balance. Exp Brain Res (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-024-06819-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-024-06819-6