Reward Enhances Online Participants’ Engagement With a Demanding Auditory Task

Abstract

Online recruitment platforms are increasingly used for experimental research. Crowdsourcing is associated with numerous benefits but also notable constraints, including lack of control over participants’ environment and engagement. In the context of auditory experiments, these limitations may be particularly detrimental to threshold-based tasks that require effortful listening. Here, we ask whether incorporating a performance-based monetary bonus improves speech reception performance of online participants. In two experiments, participants performed an adaptive matrix-type speech-in-noise task (where listeners select two key words out of closed sets). In Experiment 1, our results revealed worse performance in online ( N = 49) compared with in-lab ( N = 81) groups. Specifically, relative to the in-lab cohort, significantly fewer participants in the online group achieved very low thresholds. In Experiment 2 ( N = 200), we show that a monetary reward improved listeners’ thresholds to levels similar to those observed in the lab setting. Overall, the results suggest that providing a small performance-based bonus increases participants’ task engagement, facilitating a more accurate estimation of auditory ability under challenging listening conditions.

No link between Speech-in-noise perception and Auditory short-term memory – evidence from a large cohort of older and younger listeners

“…Our usual practice is to exclude participants who fail the test (e.g. Bianco et al, 2021). Here, because we were uncertain about the extent to which older people will exhibit difficulties with the binaural test used in the headphone screen, all participants were allowed to proceed irrespective of whether they passed or failed.…”

“…A speech recognition threshold (SRT) for each participant was obtained using target sentences introduced by Messaoud-Galusi, Hazan, & Rosen (2011) -a modified version of the CRM corpus described by (Bolia et al, 2000). The same online implementation was previously used by Bianco et al (2021). On each trial, participants heard a target sentence of the form "show the dog where the [colour] [number] is.".…”

“…Using an online experimental platform (Prolific and Gorilla), we recruited 199 old and 148 young participants who reported no known hearing problems. We measured their speech perception ability by means of a coordinate response measure (CRM) task -an adaptive matrix-type speech-innoise task (where listeners select two key words out of a closed set of colours and digits) in the presence of a two male-speaker babble (as implemented in Bianco, Mills, de Kerangal, Rosen, & Chait, 2021;de Kerangal, Vickers, & Chait, 2020;Messaoud-Galusi, Hazan, & Rosen, 2011). The CRM task is particularly effective for the present investigation because it minimizes the use of semantic information and working memory, instead relying on listeners' ability to perceive fine-grained detail of the target-speech -a process that has been previously hypothesized to draw on auditory shortterm memory (Pisoni, 1975).…”

Robust and efficient online auditory psychophysics

“…Individual differences in threshold levels might be influenced by participants' arousal, engagement, or fatigue (Bianco et al, 2021;Libera and Chelazzi, 2006;Shen and Chun, 2011). Therefore, we presented the Apathy Motivation Index (AMI) questionnaire before the experiment to measure lack of motivation (apathy).…”

“…This disruption has inspired unexpectedly successful innovations in porting auditory research to participants' home offices and living rooms, using only the internet bandwidth, computers, and headphones at participants' immediate disposal. For instance, several groups have created clever tests for ensuring participants are using headphones rather than speakers (Milne et al, 2020;Woods et al, 2017), and that they are engaging with the experimental task, rather than haphazardly pressing buttons (Bianco et al, 2021;Mok et al, 2021;Zhao et al, 2019). Such innovations notwithstanding, uncontrolled online experimental situations are particularly challenging for auditory paradigms that deliver stimuli at a given sound pressure level or that require sustained vigilance to respond consistently to an ever more difficult-to-perceive target sound, as is often found in psychophysical thresholding procedures.…”