Physiological Markers of Auditory Situational Awareness in Complex Spatialised Scenes

Detecting changes in acoustic environments is essential for situational awareness. It remains unclear whether the spatial location of such changes modulates automatic orienting and arousal mechanisms. We measured pupil dilation, pupil dilation rate, and microsaccade rate while listeners (n=25) heard complex, spatialized auditory scenes rendered over headphones using individualized HRTFs. Participants were naïve to the critical manipulation: the appearance of a new source from one of five locations: front, left, right, back, or above. A subsequent localization task assessed perceptual spatial uncertainty.

Behaviorally-irrelevant source appearances elicited a cascade of ocular responses. Microsaccadic inhibition emerged from ∼85ms after change onset, and was broadly comparable across locations, suggesting a location-invariant early orienting response to auditory change. Pupil dilation rate increased from ∼200ms, followed by a phasic pupil dilation response from ∼400ms, indicating engagement of arousal-related systems. Pupil responses were modulated by source location: changes from front/left/right elicited larger dilation than changes from above, with back responses showing a similar but weaker reduction. Behavioral localization revealed substantial confusion for front/back/above locations. However, this did not mirror the physiological data, as front sources elicited pupil responses comparable to lateral sources.

These findings demonstrate that complex auditory scene changes recruit oculomotor and autonomic systems even outside the focus of task relevance. They further suggest a dissociation between early, location-invariant attentional capture indexed by microsaccadic inhibition and later, location-sensitive arousal indexed by pupil dilation. Spatial biases in auditory situational awareness therefore appear to emerge after initial change detection, shaping arousal and behavioral performance rather than the earliest orienting response.