Situational awareness assessment of hearing protection

Uncompromised situational awareness has become a critical component of hearing protection devices (HPDs). Situational awareness is a complex psychological phenomenon, which consists of several perceptual and cognitive factors. This study presents data from three experiments designed to analyze the performance of HPDs on measures of situational awareness and determine how multiple factors may impact in-the-field performance. Data are presented for four hearing protection devices on measures of sound localization, distance perception, spatial segregation, speech intelligibility, and dynamic scene analysis. Baseline (open-ear) data is also presented to contrast with the HPDs. Small differences in fine localization-discrimination and the number of large quadrant errors were observed, but these differences between devices were not observed in the more complex scene analysis task. A performance index was developed to determine overall performance of each HPD compared to open-ear performance. This index combined components from each experiment with subcategories of spatial segregation, object segregation, and attention. The index found no major differences between HPDs; however, it may serve as a reliable summary measure in future assessments of situational awareness.