Portable Automated Rapid Testing (PART) measures for auditory research

Abstract

This presentation will focus on data collected across the globe on tablet computers using applications available for free download, built-in sound hardware, and calibrated consumer-grade headphones. Tests involve spatial release from speech-on-speech masking, binaural sensitivity, gap discrimination, temporal modulation, spectral modulation, and spectrotemporal modulation. The data will be compared across sites and with data from the published literature. The similarity of the obtained data to the expected values and the consistency across sites will help evaluate the potential of this relatively inexpensive and easily disseminated approach to psychoacoustical data collection. The extent to which valid performance can be obtained is a metric of the possibility that in the future such test methods could be used by researchers without access to a full laboratory, clinicians interested in evaluating auditory function beyond the audiogram, and students as part of their training, as well as many other uses not yet imagined.

Reward enhances online participants’ engagement with a demanding auditory task

“…Previous studies suggest that performance on many crowdsourcing tasks does not differ, and sometimes even exceeds that measured in the lab (Gallun et al, 2018; Hauser & Schwarz, 2016; Lelo de Larrea-Mancera et al, 2020; but see Harrison & Müllensiefen, 2018; Slote & Strand, 2016). Additionally, monetary incentive (amount of pay) does not necessarily affect performance (van den Berg, Zou, & Ma, 2019): For example, previous studies reported no modulatory effects of amount of monetary incentive on the quality of online performance in tasks such as speech transcriptions (Marge, Banerjee, & Rudnicky, 2010).…”