Effects of Gamification on Performance and Subjective Listening Effort on a Spatial Release From Masking Task

Purpose: Current theories of listening effort posit that motivation should influence a participant's level of effort and performance on a listening task. Gamification may be a means of manipulating motivation to test these hypotheses. This study compared a traditional and gamified version of a spatial release from masking test to determine if gamification yields better performance or subjective differences in listening effort compared to the traditional test.

Method: Thirty-four adults (aged 20-47 years) with normal hearing completed a traditional and gamified version of a spatial release from masking test. The gamified test was themed as a spaceship race; correct responses made their ship go faster and revealed a pattern of game pieces that formed a path across the board. Both tests adapted the target-to-masker ratio based on performance to estimate threshold from a psychometric function. Subjective ratings of mental demand, fatigue, pace, enjoyment, frustration, and perceived success for each test were compared between two tests to evaluate perceived listening effort and characterize the participant experience.

Results: Behavioral data indicated better thresholds in the gamified test than the traditional test. Participants reported more mental demand on the gamified test than the traditional test, but also more frustration and lower perceived success. The latter findings may have been driven by a propensity for participants to lose the race when the speech task was close to their performance threshold.

Conclusions: Gamified testing is an effective way to improve performance and increase mental demand exerted by participants on speech-in-noise tests. Subjective ratings revealed that listeners' perception of success and frustration may have been biased by the outcome of the game, rather than the difficulty of the underlying speech task (identical for both tests). These results suggest that gamification may be a means of manipulating motivation to evaluate its effect on a speech-in-noise task.