Paired comparison against anchors reduces bias in absolute judgments

Evidence

Different methods are used to measure psychophysical functions with a direct scaling task. Measurements using a single auditory event only are prone to noise and bias, since the human senses have limited accuracy when evaluating the strength of a stimulus on an absolute scale. It is often beneficial to conduct the test so that the sound event being studied is compared to one or more known reference sound events, which are sometimes called anchors. … In audio quality measurements, such tests are often referred to as the multiple-stimulus-hidden-reference-with-anchors (MUSHRA) type of tests, which will be discussed in Section 17.4.2 in more detail. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 923

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the anchor/comparison paradigm and the MUSHRA test name.
• XREF: connects to: Judgements of similarity depend on the available comparative frame, not just absolute difference. — Anna X. Huang, Jacqueline M. Chen, and Juliane Degner, Being One or the Other, Both or…, 50