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

Cognitive effort, in other words how hard people are willing to work on a task, depends entirely on motivation. We developed the Engaging Stories for the Study of Attention and Audition (ESSAA) database as a resource to help researchers who use narrative stimuli and wish to leverage motivation to ensure optimal performance from their participants in studies of attention, audition, or reading. Twenty-four short stories with spoken lengths between 10 and 20 minutes were rated using Kuijpers’ Story World Absorption Scale. To date, 1091 valid responses have been obtained from undergraduate participants between the ages of 16 and 25 (M = 19.3, SD = 1.5 years of age). Attention towards the stories, which were presented in text format, was verified using 10-item factual quizzes. Interest ratings for narrator reading styles were also obtained using 30 second excerpts from the associated LibriVox audiobooks. All of these ratings, and the quizzes themselves, are freely available via the Open Science Framework. Absorption, as rated on Kuijpers’ scale, varied significantly between some stories and was weakly, but significantly, affected by the year of publication of the story and the category of the work (fiction vs. nonfiction). Interest in the narrators’ reading styles tended not to vary. The strongest effect was a correlation between absorption and scores on the factual quizzes (rs = 0.40, p < .001). We conclude that the choice of narrator in an experimental design is not particularly important, but the choice of story is. Similarly, factual questions to verify attention should be interpreted with caution when the narrative content is not engaging. The results presented here are illustrative, as the database is intended to grow.