Data from: EEG sonification improves sleep staging performance in novice stagers

Sleep staging is a critical tool used in research and clinical settings to
evaluate and diagnose sleep conditions; however, sleep staging is labor
intensive and may be challenging for inexperienced practitioners. We
explored whether adding an auditory representation (sonification) of the
EEG to a standard visual representation could improve sleep staging
performance or reduce workload. This is the first study to investigate the
effects of sonification on sleep staging performance. We performed a
within-subjects study in which 40 participants completed an online sleep
staging task with and without sonified EEG. EEG was sonified by minimal
transformation in which the raw EEG signal was played as an audio signal.
Contrary to our hypothesis, we found that adding sonification did not
result in improvements in accuracy, speed, or workload for the entire
subject group. However, when we stratified participants by sleep staging
experience, we found sonification improved accuracy for the least
experienced participants. These findings suggest EEG sonification may be
useful as a tool to enable novice sleep stagers to reach acceptable
performance levels faster.This repository contains the responses given by
participants and their accuracy, along with demogrpahic, survey
information, and R files needed to replicate our analysis.