We investigated street-crossing decisions in individuals with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) compared to a group with normal vision, using highly realistic visual and acoustic simulations of a vehicle approaching a pedestrian. Participants pressed a button at the last safe moment they could safely start crossing the street. The vehicle was presented visually, auditorily, or both concurrently. We present a novel analysis method for estimating the relative importance of visual and auditory cues for the crossing decision. In single-modality conditions, cue weights indicated that responses were associated not only with the vehicle's arrival time (i.e., gap duration), as it would be if decisions were based on an unbiased estimate of the arrival time, but also with the vehicle’s spatial distance, optical size, acoustic vehicle source intensity, and with time elapsed after the trial start. In the audiovisual condition, auditory and visual cues were associated with the responses. Results are largely compatible with cue weights in arrival time estimates made by the same participants, reported in a previous paper. The cue weights showed minor differences between the groups with AMD and normal vision. Analyses of the mean judged shortest safe gaps and their intraindividual variability showed effects of vehicle speed, source intensity, and size, compatible with the cue weights and TTC estimation results from our previous paper, but again with minor differences between the two groups. However, the proportion of safe crossing decisions was lower in the AMD group, due to a slower walking speed. Our study provides important insights into the decision-making in crossing decisions and shows that AMD had a surprisingly small effect on such decisions.

To safely cross a street while a vehicle is approaching, pedestrians must estimate how long it will take for the vehicle to reach their position. Recent studies have shown that estimation of a vehicle's arrival time (i.e., time-to-collision (TTC) estimation) is affected by the intensity of the vehicle’s sound. When presented with the same actual TTC, louder sound sources were perceived as arriving earlier than quieter sources (the so-called “intensity-arrival effect”). However, in these experiments the vehicle sound power (also referred to as source intensity) was varied from trial to trial, potentially directing participants’ attention to the intensity variation. Here, we used high fidelity acoustic simulations of approaching vehicles, to investigate whether the effect of vehicle sound power on auditory TTC estimation persists when it is varied from block to block rather than from trial to trial. Results showed a significant intensity-arrival effect for the blockwise vehicle sound power variation. However, this effect was much weaker compared to a condition where the vehicle sound power varied from trial to trial.

We investigated whether vehicle sound power affects pedestrians’ street-crossing decisions. In a virtual environment, we presented high-fidelity interactive acoustic and visual simulations of a vehicle approaching a pedestrian standing on the sidewalk, in an auditory-only and an audiovisual modality condition. The vehicle was presented for several seconds and then disappeared from the display and was no longer audible (hereafter referred to as “occlusion“). Participants judged whether, at the moment of occlusion, they could have safely started crossing the street the street while the vehicle was approaching (i.e., accepted the gap), or whether they had to wait until the vehicle passed them. Using an adaptive psychophysical procedure, we measured psychometric functions mapping the relationship between the arrival time of the vehicle at the moment of occlusion and the probability of a gap-acceptance decision, and introduce a novel measure of the riskiness of the individual crossing decisions. The results showed that participants accepted shorter gaps and made riskier crossing decisions when the vehicle sound power was lower compared to higher. This effect of sound power occurred in both modality conditions, though it was stronger when only auditory information was available. Reverse-correlation analyses of the trial-by-trial data showed that the vehicle sound intensity at the pedestrian’s position was the most important predictor of the decisions in the auditory-only condition, but that participants did not base their decision exclusively on the sound intensity. In the audiovisual condition, sound intensity also was significantly associated with the crossing decision, but visual cues dominated. Implications for road traffic safety are discussed, specifically concerning interactions between pedestrians and quieter electric vehicles.

This manuscript originally included analyses provided as supplementary material for a main paper on the effects of vehicle source intensity (vehicle sound power) on pedestrians’ street-crossing decisions. An updated version of all analyses originally presented in this manuscript has now been integrated into an extended version of the main paper (Oberfeld, Huisman, & DeLucia, 2026), available as a preprint on OSF.io (https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/nykfm_v2 ). Please refer to that full paper. •Oberfeld, D., Huisman, T., & DeLucia, P. R. (2026). Quieter vehicles result in riskier pedestrian street-crossing decisions. Preprint. doi: 10.31234/osf.io/nykfm_v2

We measured time-to-collision (TTC) judgments of (imaginary) approaching objects based on a 250-Hz vibrotactile stimulus delivered to the fingertips by a C-2 tactor. Changes in stimulus intensity simulated a sound source that approached a receiver. The vibration stopped after 1 s when the (imaginary) object’s actual TTC was between 0.5 s and 6 s. Participants were told to press a key when they thought the object would reach them. They also were told that intensity signified the object’s distance (less intense is farther). Mean estimated TTC increased as actual TTC increased, as it does in auditory and visual modalities, but the relationship was more compressed with tactile stimuli. Judgments were driven by final vibration intensity, rather than the object’s presented TTC, as we reported previously with auditory TTC estimation. Results have implications for the design of technologies used to aid drivers or pedestrians avoid collisions, particularly those with vision loss.

Little is known about whether and to what degree people with different amounts of visual impairment rely on hearing instead of vision for mobility, particularly in judgments of collision. We measured how much importance was assigned to visual and auditory cues during time-to-collision judgments made by people with age-related macular degeneration (Impaired Vision Group; IV) compared to a control group without age-related macular degeneration (Normal Vision Group; NV). A virtual reality system simulated a roadway with an approaching vehicle viewed from the perspective of a pedestrian. Participants pressed a button to indicate the time the vehicle would reach them. The vehicle was presented visually only, aurally only, or both simultaneously. Standardized regression coefficients and general dominance weights indicated that time-to-collision (TTC) judgments were determined by both auditory and visual cues in both groups. In the vision-only modality condition, the relative importance of distance and optical size compared to TTC was higher in the IV group compared to the NV group, but with a relatively small effect size. In all modality conditions, the mean absolute error of TTC estimates was comparable between groups, and a multimodal advantage was not observed. Intraindividual variability was greater in the IV group only in the AV condition. The implication is that similar performance can be achieved through the use of different sources of information. Importantly, people with and without IV achieved similar performance but showed differences in the relative importance of different sensory sources of information. A comparison of two IV subgroups differing in severity suggested that simply having IV in both eyes is not sufficient to predict TTC estimation differences between people with IV and people without IV who have normal vision. Rather it appears to be the degree of bilateral visual impairment of the IV that matters.

We measured time-to-collision (TTC) judgments from participants with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), and normal vision (NV) controls, with an audiovisual virtual reality system that simulated vehicles approaching in a 3D traffic environment. The vehicle was presented visually only, aurally only, or both simultaneously, allowing us to determine the relative importance of visual and auditory cues with psychophysical reverse correlation. Results indicated that TTC judgments were based on both auditory and visual cues in the AMD and NV groups; the AMD group relied, at least in part, on their residual vision. A multimodal advantage was not observed in either group. TTC estimation in the AMD group was surprisingly similar to that in the NV group. However, the AMD group showed a higher relative importance of "heuristic" cues compared to more reliably accurate cues favored by the NV group, suggesting that similar performance may be achieved through different cue-weighting strategies.

To safely cross a street while a vehicle is approaching, pedestrians must estimate how long it will take for the vehicle to reach their position. Recent studies have shown that estimation of a vehicle's arrival time (i.e., time-to-collision (TTC) estimation) is affected by the intensity of the vehicle’s sound. When presented with the same actual TTC, louder sound sources were perceived as arriving earlier than quieter sources (the so-called “intensity-arrival effect”). However, in these experiments the vehicle source intensity was varied from trial to trial, potentially directing participants’ attention to the intensity variation. Here, we used high fidelity acoustic simulations of approaching vehicles, to investigate whether the effect of source intensity on auditory TTC estimation persists when the source intensity is varied from block to block rather than from trial to trial. Results showed a significant intensity-arrival effect for the blockwise intensity variation. However, this effect was much weaker compared to a condition where the vehicle source intensity varied from trial to trial.

This document reports additional analyses results for the experiment on the effect of vehicle source intensity on street-crossing decisions published in Oberfeld, Huisman, and DeLucia (submitted to Forum Acusticum 2025). Analyses of the riskiness of the observed crossing decisions (risk measure p-sub-risk) and psychophysical reverse-correlation analyses gauging the relative importance of potential auditory and visual cues for the crossing decisions are reported in the main paper (Oberfeld, et al., submitted to Forum Acusticum 2025).

This article presents a free association database containing responses to 62 stimulus words (including colour terms, emotion words, and common nouns) across seven languages: English, Estonian, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, and Spanish. Data were collected online from 1,439 participants (mean age 31.47 years) across 14 countries, yielding 223,786 responses. All data were cleaned, normalised, and organised for analysis, with both raw and processed datasets available on OSF. This cross-linguistic resource enables research on semantic networks, psycholinguistics, translation studies, and cross-cultural comparisons, providing insights into how meaning is constructed within and across different languages and cultures.

Non-uniform temporal weights (TWs) are often reported regarding the perceptual evaluation of dynamic auditory and visual information, such as perceptual judgments of the overall intensity of time-varying stimuli. In particular, primacy effects, i.e., a stronger influence of early compared to later stimulus information on the perceptual decision, have been observed across a large number of studies. Yet, it is not clear whether these non-uniform patterns of TWs result from sensory or attentional processes that coincidentally produce similar time-courses, or whether they reflect the common signature of supra-modal and subject-specific decision-making processes. The present study addresses the hypothesis that TWs in loudness (perceived auditory intensity) and brightness (perceived visual intensity) judgments result from a common supramodal evidence-integration process. In Experiment 1, we compared TWs for loudness and brightness judgments in the same participants, with task difficulty matched individually. The observed average temporal weighting profiles differed substantially between the two modalities. In Experiment 2, we assessed the additional contribution of modality-specific sensory and attentional processes to the observed differences between TWs by measuring intensity resolution at different temporal positions in the auditory and visual stimuli. We observed a significantly different dependence of sensitivity on temporal position in the two modalities, but these sensitivity differences only partially accounted for the temporal weighting differences observed in Experiment 1. The collective findings indicate that the TWs observed for loudness and brightness judgments cannot be attributed to a supramodal evidence-integration process alone. Instead, our results suggest that both sensory and decision-making processes shape patterns of TWs.

In everyday life, the auditory system often receives input from various sound sources at different positions in space more or less simultaneously. The present study investigates how listeners weight different spatial positions when judging the overall loudness of a spatially distributed sound field. Spatial weights were measured in two conditions. In both conditions, sounds were presented from five spatial positions: front, left, right, top and back, using five loudspeakers distributed spatially around the listener. In the first condition, bandpass noises were presented simultaneously on all five loudspeakers. The sounds emanating from the different loudspeakers did not overlap spectrally, to ensure that they could be differentiated from each other. In the second condition, a broadband noise was presented at each of the five spatial positions. In this condition, sounds from the five different positions were presented consecutively. In both conditions, listeners judged the overall loudness of the sound fields. Before measuring spatial weights, all sounds were equalised in loudness. Both conditions showed virtually identical spatial weights for all five spatial positions. Thus, the weight assigned to a specific sound source in judgments of the overall loudness of spatially distributed sound fields appears to be unaffected by the spatial position of the source.

Listeners with normal audiometric thresholds show substantial variability in their ability to understand speech in noise (SiN). These individual differences have been reported to be associated with a range of auditory and cognitive abilities. The present study addresses the association between SiN processing and the individual susceptibility of short-term memory to auditory distraction (i.e., the irrelevant sound effect [ISE]). In a sample of 67 young adult participants with normal audiometric thresholds, we measured speech recognition performance in a spatial listening task with two interfering talkers (speech-in-speech identification), audiometric thresholds, binaural sensitivity to the temporal fine structure (interaural phase differences [IPD]), serial memory with and without interfering talkers, and self-reported noise sensitivity. Speech-in-speech processing was not significantly associated with the ISE. The most important predictors of high speech-in-speech recognition performance were a large short-term memory span, low IPD thresholds, bilaterally symmetrical audiometric thresholds, and low individual noise sensitivity. Surprisingly, the susceptibility of short-term memory to irrelevant sound accounted for a substantially smaller amount of variance in speech-in-speech processing than the nondisrupted short-term memory capacity. The data confirm the role of binaural sensitivity to the temporal fine structure, although its association to SiN recognition was weaker than in some previous studies. The inverse association between self-reported noise sensitivity and SiN processing deserves further investigation.

When a pedestrian intends to cross the street, it is essential for safe mobility to correctly estimate the arrival time (time-to-collision, TTC) of an approaching vehicle. However, visual perception of acceleration is rather imprecise. Previous studies consistently showed that humans (mostly) disregard acceleration, but judge the TTC for an object as if it were traveling at constant speed (first-order estimation), which is associated with overestimated TTCs for positively accelerating objects. In a traffic context, such TTC overestimation could motivate pedestrians to cross in front of an approaching vehicle, although the time remaining is not sufficiently long. Can a simple acceleration signal help improve visual TTC estimation for accelerating objects? The present study investigated whether a signal that only indicates whether a vehicle is accelerating or not can remove the first-order pattern of overestimated TTCs. In a virtual reality simulation, 26 participants estimated the TTC of vehicles that approached with constant velocity or accelerated, from the perspective of a pedestrian at the curb. In half of the experimental blocks, a light band on the windshield illuminated whenever the vehicle accelerated but remained deactivated when the vehicle travelled at a constant speed. In the other blocks, the light band never illuminated, regardless of whether or not the vehicle accelerated. Participants were informed about the light band function in each block. Without acceleration signal, the estimated TTCs for the accelerating vehicles were consistent with an erroneous first-order approximation. In blocks with acceleration signal, participants substantially changed their estimation strategy, so that TTC overestimations for accelerating vehicles were reduced. Our data suggest that a binary acceleration signal helps pedestrians to effectively reduce the TTC overestimation for accelerating vehicles and could therefore increase pedestrian safety.

When judging the time-to-collision (TTC) of visually presented accelerating vehicles, untrained observers do not adequately account for acceleration (second-order information). Instead, their estimations only rely on vehicle distance and velocity (first-order information). As a result, they systemically overestimate the TTC for accelerating objects, which represents a potential risk for pedestrians in traffic situations because it might trigger unsafe road-crossing behavior. Can training help reduce these estimation errors? In this study, we tested whether training with trial-by-trial feedback about the signed deviation of the estimated from the actual TTC can improve TTC estimation accuracy for accelerating vehicles. Using a prediction-motion paradigm, we measured the estimated TTCs of twenty participants for constant-velocity and accelerated vehicle approaches, from a pedestrian's perspective in a VR traffic simulation. The experiment included three blocks, of which only the second block provided trial-by-trial feedback about the TTC estimation accuracy. Participants adjusted their estimations during and after the feedback, but they failed to differentiate between accelerated and constant-velocity approaches. Thus, the feedback did not help them account for acceleration. The results suggest that a safety training program based on trial-by-trial feedback is not a promising countermeasure against pedestrians' erroneous TTC estimation for accelerating objects.

As people age, they tend to spend more time indoors, and the colours in their surroundings may significantly impact their mood and overall well-being. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence to provide informed guidance on colour choices, irrespective of age group. To work towards informed choices, we investigated whether the associations between colours and emotions observed in younger individuals also apply to older adults. We recruited 7393 participants, aged between 16 and 88 years and coming from 31 countries. Each participant associated 12 colour terms with 20 emotion concepts and rated the intensity of each associated emotion. Different age groups exhibited highly similar patterns of colour-emotion associations (average similarity coefficient of .97), with subtle yet meaningful age-related differences. Adolescents associated the greatest number but the least positively biased emotions with colours. Older participants associated a smaller number but more intense and more positive emotions with all colour terms, displaying a positivity effect. Age also predicted arousal and power biases, varying by colour. Findings suggest parallels in colour-emotion associations between younger and older adults, with subtle but significant age-related variations. Future studies should next assess whether colour-emotion associations reflect what people actually feel when exposed to colour.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, many governments introduced nationwide lockdowns that disrupted people's daily routines and promoted social isolation. We applied a longitudinal online survey to investigate the mid-term effects of the mandated restrictions on the perceived passage of time (PPT) and boredom during and after a strict lockdown in Germany. One week after the beginning of the lockdown in March 2020, respondents reported a slower PPT and increased boredom compared to the pre-pandemic level. However, in the course of the lockdown, PPT accelerated and boredom decreased again until August 2020. Then, in October 2020, when incidence rates sharply rose and new restrictions were introduced, we again observed a slight trend toward a slowing of PPT and an increase of boredom. Our data also show that as the pandemic progressed, respondents adjusted their predictions about the pandemic's duration substantially upward. In sum, our findings suggest that respondents adapted to the pandemic situation and anticipated it as the new "normal". Furthermore, we determined perceived boredom and the general emotional state to be predictive of PPT, while depressive symptoms played a minor role.

The perceived width, depth, and height of interior spaces depend not only on the actual dimensions of the rooms but also on the brightness of room surfaces and other visual factors.Here, we measured the effect of the acoustic properties of the room surfaces on perceived size.Simulated rectangular rooms (light gray surface textures, no windows) with varying width and depth were presented on an HTC Vive Pro with head-tracking.For each combination of width and depth, one version with reverberant acoustics (mean RT60 = 1.03 s) and one version with damped acoustics (mean RT60 = 0.19 s) were simulated by varying the absorption coefficient of the surfaces.Binaural room impulse responses were generated using the room simulation software RAVEN (https://www.virtualacoustics.org/RAVEN/).Twenty-two participants viewed the rooms on the HMD and listened to speech and sounds of musical instruments inside the simulated space, using dynamic binaural synthesis with head-tracking.Participants estimated room width and depth in units of centimeters.As expected and compatible with previous studies, the estimated width and depth were significantly higher for the reverberant compared to the damped version of the simulated rooms.The mean increase in estimated width and depth was 1.1% (Cohen's dz = 0.849) and 1.6% (dz = 0.854), respectively.

To avoid collisions, pedestrians intending to cross a road need to accurately estimate the time-tocollision (TTC) of an approaching vehicle. For TTC estimation, auditory information can be considered particularly relevant when the approaching vehicle accelerates. The sound of vehicles with internal combustion engine (ICEVs) provides characteristic auditory information about the acceleration state (increasing rotational speed and engine load). However, for electric vehicles (EVs), the acoustic signature during acceleration is less salient. Although the auditory detection of EVs has been studied extensively, there is no research on potential effects of the altered acoustic signature of EVs on TTC estimation. To close this gap, we compared TTC estimates for ICEVs and for EVs with and without activated acoustic vehicle alerting system (AVAS). We implemented a novel interactive audiovisual virtual-reality system for studying the human perception of approaching vehicles. Using acoustic recordings of real vehicles as source signals, the dynamic spatial sound field corresponding to a vehicle approaching in an urban setting is generated based on physical modeling of the sound propagation between vehicle and pedestrian (listener) and is presented via sound field synthesis (higher-order Ambisonics). In addition to the auditory simulations, the scene was visually presented on a head-mounted display with head tracking. Participants estimated the TTC of vehicles that either approached at a constant speed or accelerated positively. In conditions with constant speed, TTC estimates for EVs with and without AVAS were similar to those for ICEVs. In contrast, for accelerating vehicles, there was a substantial effect of the vehicle type on the TTC estimates. For the EVs, the mean TTC estimates showed a significant overestimation. Thus, subjects on average perceived the time of arrival of the EV at their position as longer than it actually was. The extent of overestimation increased with acceleration and presented TTC. This pattern is similar to a first-order TTC estimation representing a failure to consider the acceleration, which is consistently reported in the literature for visual-only presentations of accelerating objects. In comparison, the overestimation of TTC was largely reduced for the accelerating ICEVs. The AVAS somewhat improved the TTC estimates for the accelerating EVs, but without reaching the same level of accuracy as for the ICEVs. In real traffic scenarios, overestimations of the TTC of approaching vehicles might lead to risky road-crossing decisions. Therefore, our finding that pedestrians are significantly less able to use the acoustic information