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Reward enhances online participants’ engagement with a demanding auditory task

View ORCID ProfileRoberta Bianco, Gordon Mills, View ORCID ProfileMathilde de Kerangal, View ORCID ProfileStuart Rosen, View ORCID ProfileMaria Chait
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.09.430467
Roberta Bianco
1Ear Institute, University College London, London, UK
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  • For correspondence: r.bianco@ucl.ac.uk
Gordon Mills
1Ear Institute, University College London, London, UK
2National Institute for Health Research University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre, Deafness and Hearing Problems Theme, London, UK
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Mathilde de Kerangal
1Ear Institute, University College London, London, UK
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Stuart Rosen
3Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, London, UK
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Maria Chait
1Ear Institute, University College London, London, UK
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Abstract

Online recruitment platforms are increasingly utilized 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 will improve 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 (< -17dB) thresholds. In Experiment 2 (N = 200), we show that a monetary reward improved listeners’ threshold 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.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • ↵(*) currently at the Department of Bioengineering and Centre for Neurotechnology, Imperial College London, London, UK

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license.
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Posted February 23, 2021.
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Reward enhances online participants’ engagement with a demanding auditory task
Roberta Bianco, Gordon Mills, Mathilde de Kerangal, Stuart Rosen, Maria Chait
bioRxiv 2021.02.09.430467; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.09.430467
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Reward enhances online participants’ engagement with a demanding auditory task
Roberta Bianco, Gordon Mills, Mathilde de Kerangal, Stuart Rosen, Maria Chait
bioRxiv 2021.02.09.430467; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.09.430467

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