Larissa Leist

• PhD
• PostDoc at Rheinland-Pfälzische Technische Universität Kaiserslautern-Landau

In recent years, there has been a growing effort to create experiments that mimic real-life situations, aiming to improve the ecological validity of research. From an acoustic point of view, one step in this direction is using a binaural reproduction to create a lifelike acoustic environment for participants. However, also room acoustic parameters...

Short-term memory for sequences of verbal items such as written words is reliably impaired by task-irrelevant background sounds, a phenomenon known as the “Irrelevant Sound Effect” (ISE). Different theoretical accounts have been proposed to explain the mechanisms underlying the ISE. Some of these assume specific interference between obligatory soun...

Current research confirms the significant role of environmental quality in children´s well-being and mental health. Respective studies targeting young children focused on characteristics of the families´ immediate housing situation, e.g., household chaos. In the framework of the Equal-Life project, we investigated the relationships between neighbor...

Current research confirms the significant role of environmental quality in children´s well-being and mental health. In the framework of the Equal-Life project, we investigated the relationships between neighborhood quality and mental health in preschoolers (N=102). Data were acquired through parent questionnaires. Stepwise regression analysis ident...

In recent years, there has been a growing effort to create experiments that mimic real-life situations, aiming to improve the ecological validity of research. From an acoustic point of view, one step in this direction is to use binaural reproduction to create a lifelike acoustic environment for participants. Previous work found that white noise inf...

In the project ECoClass-VR we successively increase the realism of an existing test paradigm referred to as ”audio- visual scene analysis” by Ahrens et al. Here, subjects listen to stories told by a set of talkers surrounding them. The listeners are asked to identify the content of the talkers and their specific locations, as measures of cognitive...

In the past years, more and more effort has been made to bring the reality in the lab to investigate cognitive performance in a close-to real life manner and, thus, increase the validity of current research. A first step towards being ecologically valid is using a dynamic binaural reproduction, which offers an accurate representation and allows the...

The investigation of listening comprehension in auditory and visually complex classroom settings is a promising method to evaluate children's cognitive performance in a realistic setting. Many studies were able to show that children are more susceptible to noise than adults. However, it has recently been suggested that established monaural listenin...

The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) characterizes short-term memory performance impairment during irrelevant sounds relative to quiet. Irrelevant sound presentation in most laboratory-based ISE studies has been rather limited to represent complex scenarios including open-plan offices (OPOs) and not many studies have considered serial recall of heard...

In ECoClass-VR we investigate the suitability of audiovisual virtual environments to assess the influence of complex visual and acoustic scenes on cognitive performance in classroom-type scenarios. Until now, most studies have investigated rather simple acoustic and visual representations, which do not reflect the reality of school children. To imp...

The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) characterizes short-term memory performance impairment during irrelevant sounds relative to quiet. Irrelevant sound presentation in most ISE studies has been rather limited to represent complex scenarios including open-plan offices (OPOs) and not many studies have considered serial recall of heard information. This...

Background The exposome approach can be a powerful tool for understanding the intertwining of social, physical, and internal influences that shape mental health and cognitive development throughout childhood. To distil conceptual models for subsequent analyses, the EU-funded project Early Environmental quality and Life-course mental health effects...

Since virtual reality (VR) offers great opportunities to investigate auditory phenomena in more close to real-life scenarios, it is important to translate and extend established paradigms to consider the new technology. One major novelty in VR as opposed to classical laboratory conditions is the spatial audio setup and the added immersive visual co...

The ability to focus ones attention in different acoustical environments has been thoroughly investigated in the past. However, recent technological advancements have made it possible to perform laboratory experiments in a more realistic manner. In order to investigate close-to-real-life scenarios, a classroom was modeled in virtual reality (VR) an...

Most studies investigating the effects of environmental noise on children’s cognitive performance examine the impact of monaural noise (i.e., same signal to both ears), oversimplifying multiple aspects of binaural hearing (i.e., adequately reproducing interaural differences and spatial information). In the current study, the effects of a realistic...

Instruction at school relies heavily on oral discourse. Listening comprehension is thus of major importance for successful learning. However, in many classrooms, children’s listening is impaired by unfavourable acoustic conditions such as indoor noise and reverberation. Most studies on the effects of environmental noise on children’s speech percept...

The empirically robust phenomenon of impaired verbal short-term memory due to task-irrelevant background speech is known as the Irrelevant Sound Effect (ISE). Yet, the underlying cognitive mechanisms are still not fully resolved, like whether phonology-based interference contributes to the disruptive effect of speech on verbal serial recall. Thus,...

Immediate serial recall of visually presented items is reliably impaired by task-irrelevant speech that the participants are instructed to ignore (“irrelevant speech effect,” ISE). The ISE is stronger with changing speech tokens (words or syllables) when compared to repetitions of single tokens (“changing-state effect,” CSE). These phenomena have b...

An audio-only paradigm for investigating auditory selective attention has previously been transferred into a classroom-type audio-visual virtual reality (VR) environment. However, directly translating such a paradigm into VR does not promise a close-to-real life scenario, as possible benefits of the virtual environment are not utilized. In the audi...

In the project ECoClass-VR, which is part of the AUDIC-TIVE priority programme, we investigate the suitability of audiovisual Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) for a "real-world" assessment of cognitive performance of adults and children in classroom-type environments under different visuospatial and acoustic conditions. Existing knowledge in t...

As part of the AUDICTIVE priority program, the overall objective of the ECoClass-VR project is to investigate the cognitive behavior of children in virtual, but close to real-life settings. In the first stage of this project, three validated paradigms focusing on different aspects of auditory cognition are examined and extended towards using virtua...