The influence of audio presentation style on multitasking during teleconferences

Teleconference participants often multitask: they work on a text-based ‘foreground’ task whilst listening in the ‘background’ for an item of interest to appear. Audio material should therefore be presented in a manner that has the smallest possible impact on the foreground task without affecting topic detection. Here, we ask whether dichotic or spatialised audio presentation of a meeting is less disruptive than the single-channel mixture of talkers normally used in teleconference audio. A number of talker location configurations are used, and we examine how these impact upon a text-based foreground task: finding all letter ‘e’ occurrences in a block of text. Additionally, we examine the effect of cueing the listener to direction or gender and record listener preferences for audio presentation style. Our results suggest that spatialised audio disrupts the foreground task less than single-channel audio when direction or gender is cued.