FORUM: Remote testing for psychological and physiological acoustics

Abstract

Acoustics research involving human participants typically takes place in specialized laboratory settings. Listening studies, for example, may present controlled sounds using calibrated transducers in sound-attenuating or anechoic chambers. In contrast, remote testing takes place outside of the laboratory in everyday settings (e.g., participants' homes). Remote testing could provide greater access to participants, larger sample sizes, and opportunities to characterize performance in typical listening environments at the cost of reduced control of environmental conditions, less precise calibration, and inconsistency in attentional state and/or response behaviors from relatively smaller sample sizes and unintuitive experimental tasks. The Acoustical Society of America Technical Committee on Psychological and Physiological Acoustics launched the Task Force on Remote Testing ( https://tcppasa.org/remotetesting/ ) in May 2020 with goals of surveying approaches and platforms available to support remote testing and identifying challenges and considerations for prospective investigators. The results of this task force survey were made available online in the form of a set of Wiki pages and summarized in this report. This report outlines the state-of-the-art of remote testing in auditory-related research as of August 2021, which is based on the Wiki and a literature search of papers published in this area since 2020, and provides three case studies to demonstrate feasibility during practice.

Web-based psychoacoustics: Hearing screening, infrastructure, and validation

“…One important example of a challenge that remote testing can help mitigate is the restrictions on in-person experiments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other key advantages of remote testing include the ability to collect large datasets at lower costs, the ability to include diverse and representative cohorts of subjects, and to reach and serve certain groups who may otherwise find themselves excluded from lab-based research in the convenience of their homes (Peng et al., 2022 ). Another important advantage is that large datasets accumulate at rapid rates with web-based studies compared to lab-based studies in that participants can perform the tasks in parallel.…”

“…Indeed, web-based testing has been leveraged for longitudinal studies in other domains (Ruano et al., 2016 ). While a range of approaches can be adopted within the remote-testing umbrella (Peng et al., 2022 ), the present study focused on web-based testing on anonymous participants using their own devices and web browsers in whatever listening environments were available to them. Other remote-testing possibilities that allow for greater hardware control include shipping lab-calibrated hardware such as tablets/smartphones and a headphone to remote participants (Lelo de Larrea-Mancera et al., 2020 ), or having participants install apps on specific consumer-grade devices with known average acoustic characteristics.…”

“…The COVID-19 pandemic has also hastened the auditory research community’s trend towards adopting online platforms. Indeed, the Psychological and Physiological Acoustics Technical Committee of the Acoustical Society of America established a Remote Testing Task Force to collect and curate information aimed at enhancing the practicality and quality of research conducted via remote testing approaches (Peng et al., 2022 ). Yet, to date, the literature on web-based testing of auditory perception is limited and consists primarily of examples probing higher-level cognitive aspects of auditory perception, such as voice identity learning (Lavan et al., 2019 ), lexical influences on speech perception (Giovannone and Theodore, 2021 ), and schema learning/attentive tracking (Woods and McDermott, 2018 ).…”

Effects of Soundscape Complexity on Urban Noise Annoyance Ratings: A Large-Scale Online Listening Experiment

“…With the growing need of developing reliable protocols for online listening experiments, especially considering the constraints imposed on the laboratory settings for researchers around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic, the methodological approach of the two platforms mentioned above is now generally accepted in the environmental noise academic community, provided that a few quality checks (specified below) are put in place [ 32 ].…”

Comparison of Psychometric Functions Measured Using Remote Testing and Laboratory Testing

“…Evaluating an individual’s hearing ability reliably and accurately is very important for clinicians and researcher alike [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. The implementation of strict social distancing protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the challenges in reliably conducting in-person tests for measuring hearing acuity.…”