Engaging Stories for the Study of Attention and Audition: An Introduction to the ESSAA Database

The cognitive effort that individuals are willing to expend on difficult tasks is influenced by the extent to which they feel motivated to perform well. Such motivation can be induced extrinsically using rewards like financial incentives or might be evoked intrinsically by designing research protocols that are inherently interesting to participants. In light of recent trends towards using naturalistic, continuous speech for the study of hearing and attention, the present study aimed to characterize a selection of short stories with respect to the degree of engagement that they induce.