The purpose of this research is to help understand how our ears and brains help us interpret sounds. The long-term goals are to help those whose hearing is impaired, and to help improve how machines process sounds. As part of this study, you will be asked to use your own computer and headphones to make judgments about sounds (e.g., which of these three sounds is softest?), transcribe sounds (e.g., type the sentence spoken by the voice), or make simple judgments about images (e.g., which way is the arrow pointing?).

Although we may ask for personal information (e.g., age, hearing loss etc.), we will never ask for any information that will reveal your identity (e.g., name, email address, full date of birth etc.). We will only request that you provide your Prolific ID. We may ask for this ID in multiple places, just to be sure. For security and functionality, our website uses “cookies” (small bits of information that we will ask your browser to store).

Participation is voluntary and you can opt-out of the study at any time. This study also has a number of questions embedded as screening or quality measures. A unique combination of answers to those questions may result in your participation being concluded early by our algorithms. Thus, partial participation may occur either as a result of you deciding to end your participation early, or if our algorithms determine that your responses meet criteria for early conclusion.

The total possible compensation for the study is as listed in Prolific. Our study has multiple clearly-labeled "PARTs" (e.g., PART 1, PART 2, etc.), each accounting for a clearly-specified percentage of the total compensation. If your participation is partial, you will still be compensated for the PARTs that you complete. Note that each PART will have multiple questions and a PART is considered complete when you submit your responses to all questions within that PART.

Note: Internal demo/pilot studies conducted by SNAPlab members are uncompensated.

Because our studies involve listening to sounds, there is some mild risk of the sounds being too loud for you. To minimize this risk, all our sound-based tasks will instruct you to reduce the volume down to 25% of your device's full volume and then adjust up to a comfortable level as you listen to a calibration sound.

If you encounter any problems with our website or this study, you can contact the researcher anonymously via Prolific. We will respond to your messages within 3-4 days (usually faster).