Relating head-movement to sound events.

This thesis stems from the idea that certain sound events draw your attention involuntary, and because of that you change your behavior to, for instance, determine what caused the sound. The response (changing behavior) can give information about underlying processes of the perception of sounds and soundscapes and can also indicate the sounds preceding the response. Most psychological research on the perception of soundscapes on a macro-level uses only questionnaires and long-term measures. Research on cognitive processes study the reaction times and brain signals from EEG and fMRI devices on a micro level, but the details of (attentional) processing of the different sensory modalities are unknown. Creating a non-invasive measurement tool that can be used to measure changes in real-life behavior and correlate these to environmental stimuli can help this research. Advances in motion measurement technology have given research into human gait and classification of movement and activity a new impulse. Using the (change in) motion can distinguish human activities and it might be well suited to measure a possible change in behavior due to an external stimulus. Ever more increasing in all this research is computer aided analysis, and with it the influence of computer science. For this purpose I built a device to measure and record head-movements and sound. With one of the goals being usability in daily life this resulted in a glasses frame on which an accelerometer and microphones were placed. With this device an experiment was set up and carried out to determine if there was any relevance to the idea of relating changes in head-movement to sound events. 20 people were asked to wear the device during a reading task. During this task several sound stimuli were played that were either congruent to the experiment situation or incongruent. After the task a questionnaire was given. A control group of 4 did the same setup without hearing the sounds. While for each participant some events were detected during stimuli, this differed among the different participants. Accumulating these events per time interval did not result in clear relations to sound stimuli. Thus from this experiment no clear relation was seen in movement during the sound stimuli.