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Robust and Efficient Online Auditory Psychophysics

Most human auditory psychophysics research has historically been conducted in carefully controlled environments with calibrated audio equipment, and over potentially hours of repetitive testing with expert listeners. Here, we operationally define such conditions as having high ‘auditory hygiene’. Fr...

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Autores principales: Zhao, Sijia, Brown, Christopher A., Holt, Lori L., Dick, Frederic
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9500270/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36131515
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/23312165221118792
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author Zhao, Sijia
Brown, Christopher A.
Holt, Lori L.
Dick, Frederic
author_facet Zhao, Sijia
Brown, Christopher A.
Holt, Lori L.
Dick, Frederic
author_sort Zhao, Sijia
collection PubMed
description Most human auditory psychophysics research has historically been conducted in carefully controlled environments with calibrated audio equipment, and over potentially hours of repetitive testing with expert listeners. Here, we operationally define such conditions as having high ‘auditory hygiene’. From this perspective, conducting auditory psychophysical paradigms online presents a serious challenge, in that results may hinge on absolute sound presentation level, reliably estimated perceptual thresholds, low and controlled background noise levels, and sustained motivation and attention. We introduce a set of procedures that address these challenges and facilitate auditory hygiene for online auditory psychophysics. First, we establish a simple means of setting sound presentation levels. Across a set of four level-setting conditions conducted in person, we demonstrate the stability and robustness of this level setting procedure in open air and controlled settings. Second, we test participants’ tone-in-noise thresholds using widely adopted online experiment platforms and demonstrate that reliable threshold estimates can be derived online in approximately one minute of testing. Third, using these level and threshold setting procedures to establish participant-specific stimulus conditions, we show that an online implementation of the classic probe-signal paradigm can be used to demonstrate frequency-selective attention on an individual-participant basis, using a third of the trials used in recent in-lab experiments. Finally, we show how threshold and attentional measures relate to well-validated assays of online participants’ in-task motivation, fatigue, and confidence. This demonstrates the promise of online auditory psychophysics for addressing new auditory perception and neuroscience questions quickly, efficiently, and with more diverse samples. Code for the tests is publicly available through Pavlovia and Gorilla.
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spelling pubmed-95002702022-09-24 Robust and Efficient Online Auditory Psychophysics Zhao, Sijia Brown, Christopher A. Holt, Lori L. Dick, Frederic Trends Hear Original Article Most human auditory psychophysics research has historically been conducted in carefully controlled environments with calibrated audio equipment, and over potentially hours of repetitive testing with expert listeners. Here, we operationally define such conditions as having high ‘auditory hygiene’. From this perspective, conducting auditory psychophysical paradigms online presents a serious challenge, in that results may hinge on absolute sound presentation level, reliably estimated perceptual thresholds, low and controlled background noise levels, and sustained motivation and attention. We introduce a set of procedures that address these challenges and facilitate auditory hygiene for online auditory psychophysics. First, we establish a simple means of setting sound presentation levels. Across a set of four level-setting conditions conducted in person, we demonstrate the stability and robustness of this level setting procedure in open air and controlled settings. Second, we test participants’ tone-in-noise thresholds using widely adopted online experiment platforms and demonstrate that reliable threshold estimates can be derived online in approximately one minute of testing. Third, using these level and threshold setting procedures to establish participant-specific stimulus conditions, we show that an online implementation of the classic probe-signal paradigm can be used to demonstrate frequency-selective attention on an individual-participant basis, using a third of the trials used in recent in-lab experiments. Finally, we show how threshold and attentional measures relate to well-validated assays of online participants’ in-task motivation, fatigue, and confidence. This demonstrates the promise of online auditory psychophysics for addressing new auditory perception and neuroscience questions quickly, efficiently, and with more diverse samples. Code for the tests is publicly available through Pavlovia and Gorilla. SAGE Publications 2022-09-21 /pmc/articles/PMC9500270/ /pubmed/36131515 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/23312165221118792 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Original Article
Zhao, Sijia
Brown, Christopher A.
Holt, Lori L.
Dick, Frederic
Robust and Efficient Online Auditory Psychophysics
title Robust and Efficient Online Auditory Psychophysics
title_full Robust and Efficient Online Auditory Psychophysics
title_fullStr Robust and Efficient Online Auditory Psychophysics
title_full_unstemmed Robust and Efficient Online Auditory Psychophysics
title_short Robust and Efficient Online Auditory Psychophysics
title_sort robust and efficient online auditory psychophysics
topic Original Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9500270/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36131515
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/23312165221118792
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