Interpersonal Boundary Task - Approaching Footsteps Sound Effect

Description

In half of the trials, participants were asked to indicate “Stop” when the person heard approaching made them feel uncomfortable with the distance between themselves and the approaching person. In the other half of the trials, participants were asked to indicate “Stop” when they felt like they could touch the person they heard coming towards them. The order of these two tasks was counterbalanced across participants. In each case, the response times (RT) in milliseconds, i.e. the time taken to indicate “Stop”, were measured, with a longer RT a proxy for smaller boundaries of space. The task distinguishes between types of space representations: the former representation being involved in protecting the body, and the latter in goal-directed action. As such, we dissociate between discomfort and reaching distances. Here we adapted the auditory task by Vagnoni and colleagues (2018) to capture reaching distance to compare with discomfort distance. The walking sound effects were generated and recorded using Unity 3D (Unity Technologies, 2020). Free footstep sounds were downloaded from https://freesound.org/ and were split into single files, one file per footstep. A unity script loaded the footstep audio files when a walking animation was executed and synchronised each sound with the animation. A unity scene with an audio reverb zone was created with a maximum distance of 36 metres. An audio listener was located inside the reverb zone which allowed one to gradually change the footstep sound effect as the animation slowly moved closer to the target. The output was generated using the Unity Recorder tool.

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