THERE ARE THOSE WHO have never stopped complaining and those who have developed a habit and face it with serenity. However you live it, there mask it has become an integral part of our experience when we converse. Now, a study has looked at its impact on understanding conversations between perfectly hearing people. Not being able to see the lip results in an increase in effort in the listener, a decrease in performance and confidence in their listening experience. All this emerges by making you listen to perfectly understandable audio, clean and without acoustic distortions because recorded without mask. Furthermore, the study also shows a worsening of metacognitive monitoring, which consists in the correct evaluation and consequent control of one’s own performance.
Videoconferencing
The team from the University of Trento and Lyon that conducted the study, just published in the journal iPerception, simulated a videoconference between several people in which, as often happens, at times the speaker was clearly visible, at other times he still wore a mask. , other times the camera was off and only the name was visible. To make the situation even more likely, the videoconference was attended by many people and not just the two subjects of the experiment. As these listening conditions varied, and therefore the possibility of seeing the interlocutor in the face, the transmitted audio consisted of five-word phrases, such as “Anna buys ten useful pencils”.
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Confidence drops
To analyze only the impact of the visual stimulus, therefore the effect of lip masking, we always kept the audio message constant: in all experimental conditions, the audio was always clean because it was recorded without a mask – he explains. Elena Giovanelli, first author of the work. – In addition to a lower confidence of the listener in the accuracy of the information understood, hiding the speaker’s lip also revealed a worse metacognitive monitoring, which is the ability to adjust one’s judgment of security and self-confidence to one’s actual performance. For example, someone who only hears two out of five words is a good metacogniser if they recognize that they’ve only heard two words and don’t feel safe. “Why is this so important?” This relationship between how I performed the task and how confident I feel goes to determine the strategies that I will eventually implement to correct my performance “, adds the expert.
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In short, the masks make communication between individuals much more complicated. “Understanding a speaker wearing a face mask was, in our studio, comparable to not seeing him at all – he explains. Francesco Pavani, cognitive scientist of the University of Trento, great expert in multisensory perception and responsible for work. – This confirms the importance of visual-sound integration in language processing ”. Where, in addition to the lip, there is also the gestural.
The potential effects on the pandemic have been highlighted since the beginning of the pandemic interpersonal communication of spacing and use of the mask, but this is the first study to investigate its effects on able-bodied people. “The difficulties we found in the study are exacerbated in some populations of people, such as hearing impaired people – explains Giovanelli. We know that those with hearing problems refer more to visual information and then there are non-vocal languages, think of LIS. where some signs are discriminable only on a lip basis “.
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The loss of hearing
According to the WHO, 360 million people in the world, of which 7 in Italy (11% of the population), live with a decrease in hearing capacity, but the number is destined to double in the next thirty years. In our country, among the over 65s, hearing loss affects one in three people, resulting in demotivation of social occasions and cognitive impairment. Could there be a habit effect that reduces the negative effects of the mask? “The study was done at the beginning of the pandemic, when the mask was for the most part a novelty – replies Giovanelli – It would be interesting to do it again now, also to understand to what extent people are aware of this problem and, therefore, are looking for solutions. “.
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The strategies for coping with these difficulties are well known to women who wear the veil. Their testimonials talk about little tricks and tweaks to get your message across correctly, such as raising your voice or waving your eyebrows excessively. All actions however voluntary and therefore with a lower degree of spontaneity than the expressions we are used to reading and recognizing. Who knows if we too will find ourselves with an expressive overcommunication when we can again take off the mask. Oops, the mask.
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