Comparison of adaptive psychometric procedures motivated by the Theory of Optimal Experiments: Simulated and experimental results

The wide use of psychometric assessments and the time necessary to conduct comprehensive psychometric tests has motivated significant research into the development of psychometric testing procedures that will provide accurate and efficient estimates of the parameters of interest. One potential frame...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2008, Vol.123 (1), p.315-326
Main Authors: Remus, Jeremiah J., Collins, Leslie M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bayes Theorem
Biological and medical sciences
Computer Simulation
Exact sciences and technology
Experimental design
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Mathematics
Models, Statistical
Probability and statistics
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychometrics
Psychometrics. Statistics. Methodology
Psychophysics - instrumentation
Sciences and techniques of general use
Statistics
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Summary:The wide use of psychometric assessments and the time necessary to conduct comprehensive psychometric tests has motivated significant research into the development of psychometric testing procedures that will provide accurate and efficient estimates of the parameters of interest. One potential framework for developing adaptive psychometric procedures is the Theory of Optimal Experiments. The Theory of Optimal Experiments provides several metrics for determining informative stimulus values based on a model of the psychometric function to be provided by the investigator. In this study, two methods based on a previous implementation of the Theory of Optimal Experiments are presented for comparison to two fixed step size staircase methods and also an existing adaptive method that utilizes a Bayesian framework. The psychometric procedures were used to measure detection thresholds and discrimination limens on two separate psychoacoustic tasks with normal-hearing subjects. Computer simulations were performed based on the outcomes of the experimental psychoacoustic detection task to analyze performance over a large sample size in the case of known truth. Results suggest that the proposed stimulus selection rules motivated by the Theory of Optimal Experiments perform better than previous techniques and also extend estimation to multiple parameters.
ISSN:0001-4966
1520-8524
DOI:10.1121/1.2816567