The aim of the study was to examine how the wording of a question about audio, visual and audiovisual stimuli can affect the assessment of the environment. The participants of the psychophysical experiments were asked to rate, on a numerical scale, audio and visual information both separately and together, combined into mixes. A set of questions was used for all the investigated audio, visual, and audio-visual stimuli. The participants were asked about the comfort or the discomfort caused by the perceived stimuli presented at three different sound levels.
The results show that there are no statistically significant differences between the assessment of comfort and discomfort associated with visual samples. Actually, the comfort and discomfort ratings are equivalent to the extent that a discomfort rating can be represented as the opposite to the comfort rating, i.e. the discomfort rating is equal to the 10 minus comfort rating.
In general, the results obtained for audio and audio-visual samples were the same, with only a few exceptions that were dependent on sound level. No statistically significant differences were found for the loudest stimuli, but there were some exceptions for the softener cases. Based on the results, we show that only for visual stimuli both scales are totally interchangeable. When presenting audio and audio-visual samples, only one scale should be applied – either discomfort or comfort, depending on the context and the character of the stimuli.

This study investigates listeners’ perceptual responses in audio-visual interactions concerning binaural spatial audio. Audio stimuli are coupled with or without visual cues to the listeners. The subjective test participants are tasked to indicate the direction of the incoming sound while listening to the audio stimulus via loudspeakers or headphones with the head-related transfer function (HRTF) plugin. First, the methodology assumptions and the experimental setup are described to the participants. Then, the results are presented and analysed using statistical methods. The results indicate that the headphone trials showed much higher perceptual ambiguity for the listeners than when the sound is delivered via loudspeakers. The influence of the visual modality dominates the audio-visual evaluation when loudspeaker playback is employed. Moreover, when the visual stimulus is present, the headphone playback pattern of behavior is not always in response to the loudspeaker playback.