Engaging Stories for the Study of Attention and Audition (ESSAA): A Database of Engagement Scores for Narrative Stimuli

The amount of cognitive effort that individuals are willing to expend on difficult tasks is influenced by their motivation to perform well. Given recent trends towards using naturalistic stimuli to study hearing and attention, the Engaging Stories for the Study of Attention and Audition (ESSAA) database was developed as a resource for researchers to select short works that are engaging for undergraduate student participants. To date, 1091 valid responses have been obtained from adolescents and young adults between the ages of 16 and 25 (M = 19.3, SD = 1.5 years of age). However, the database is intended to grow over time. The present report describes results from the 24 stories for which at least 20 usable responses have been obtained. Participants read short written works that were selected from the public domain whose spoken durations were between 10 and 20 minutes, then completed a 10-item factual quiz, and Kuijpers’ Story World Absorption Scale. Finally, they listened to a 30 sec excerpt from the associated LibriVox audiobook and ranked their interest in the narrator’s reading style. The year of publication and category of the short work (fiction vs. nonfiction) significantly affected absorption, but these effects were weak. Absorption scores varied significantly between some works and accuracy on the factual quiz tended to correlate with absorption (rs = 0.40, p < .001). Interest ratings for the narrators’ reading styles, by contrast, rarely differed significantly. These results suggest that, while the choice of story is important for designing an interesting study, the choice of narrator is less relevant. Our results also warrant caution in the use of factual quizzes to verify attention towards narrative stimuli that are not engaging. The ESSAA database is freely available via the Open Science Framework.