{"doi":"10.3758/s13428-023-02101-9","title":"Web-based psychoacoustics: Hearing screening, infrastructure, and validation","abstract":"Anonymous web-based experiments are increasingly used in many domains of behavioral research. However, online studies of auditory perception, especially of psychoacoustic phenomena pertaining to low-level sensory processing, are challenging because of limited available control of the acoustics, and the inability to perform audiometry to confirm normal-hearing status of participants. Here, we outline our approach to mitigate these challenges and validate our procedures by comparing web-based measurements to lab-based data on a range of classic psychoacoustic tasks. Individual tasks were created using jsPsych, an open-source JavaScript front-end library. Dynamic sequences of psychoacoustic tasks were implemented using Django, an open-source library for web applications, and combined with consent pages, questionnaires, and debriefing pages. Subjects were recruited via Prolific, a subject recruitment platform for web-based studies. Guided by a meta-analysis of lab-based data, we developed and validated a screening procedure to select participants for (putative) normal-hearing status based on their responses in a suprathreshold task and a survey. Headphone use was standardized by supplementing procedures from prior literature with a binaural hearing task. Individuals meeting all criteria were re-invited to complete a range of classic psychoacoustic tasks. For the re-invited participants, absolute thresholds were in excellent agreement with lab-based data for fundamental frequency discrimination, gap detection, and sensitivity to interaural time delay and level difference. Furthermore, word identification scores, consonant confusion patterns, and co-modulation masking release effect also matched lab-based studies. Our results suggest that web-based psychoacoustics is a viable complement to lab-based research. Source code for our infrastructure is provided.","journal":"Behavior Research Methods","year":2023,"id":336337,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":19,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9552,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":711962,"name":"Vibha Viswanathan","orcid":"0000-0002-3475-421X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":807097,"name":"Agudemu Borjigin","orcid":"0000-0003-3242-8653","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":807098,"name":"Ravinderjit Singh","orcid":"0000-0001-8195-6992","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":807595,"name":"Homeira I. Kafi","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":542290,"name":"Hari Bharadwaj","orcid":"0000-0001-8685-9630","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":807594,"name":"Brittany A. Mok","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":78,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:10:17.243221Z","pmid":"37326771","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}