Reliable Online Auditory Cognitive Testing: An observational study

Technological advances have allowed researchers to conduct research remotely. Online auditory testing has received interest since the Covid-19 pandemic. A number of web-based developments have improved the range of auditory tasks during remote participation. Most of these studies have been conducted in young, motivated individuals who are comfortable with technology. Such studies have also used stimuli testing auditory perceptual abilities. Research on auditory cognitive abilities in real-world older adults is lacking.

In this study, we assess the reproducibility of a range of auditory cognitive abilities in older adults, with a range of hearing abilities, who took part in in-person and online experiments. Participants performed a questionnaire-based assessment and were asked to complete two verbal speech-in-noise perception tasks, for digits and sentences, and two auditory memory tasks, for different sound features. In the first part of the study, 58 Participants performed these tests in-person and online in order to test the reproducibility of the tasks. In the second part, 147 participants conducted all the tasks online in order to test if previously published findings from in-person research were reproducible.

We found that older adults under the age of 70 and those with a better hearing were more likely to take part in online testing. The questionnaire-based test had significantly better reproducibility than the behavioural auditory tests but there were no differences in reproducibility between in-person and online auditory cognitive metrics. Relationships between relationships with age and hearing thresholds in an in-person or online setting were not significantly different.

Furthermore, important relationships between auditory metrics, evidenced in literature previously, were reproducible online.

This study suggests that auditory cognitive testing may be reliably conducted online.