Towards Plausible Cognitive Research in Virtual Environments: The Effect of Audiovisual Cues on Short-Term Memory in Two Talker Conversations

When three or more people are involved in a conversation, often one conversational partner listens to what the others are saying and has to remember the conversational content. The setups in cognitive-psychological experiments often differ substantially from everyday listening situations by neglecting such audiovisual cues. The presence of speech-related audiovisual cues, such as the spatial position, and the appearance or non-verbal behavior of the conversing talkers may influence the listener's memory and comprehension of conversational content. In our project, we provide first insights into the contribution of acoustic and visual cues on short-term memory, and (social) presence. Analyses have shown that the memory performance varies with increasingly more plausible audiovisual characteristics. Furthermore, we have conducted a series of experiments regarding the influence of the visual reproduction medium (virtual reality vs. traditional computer screens) and spatial or content audio-visual mismatch on auditory short-term memory performance. Adding virtual embodiments to the talkers allowed us to conduct experiments on the influence of the fidelity of co-verbal gestures and turn-taking signals. Thus, we are able to provide a more plausible paradigm for investigating memory for two-talker conversations within an interactive audiovisual virtual reality environment.