Smartphones revolutionize psychological experiments
- Date:
- September 30, 2011
- Source:
- University of Royal Holloway London
- Summary:
- Researchers have tapped into smartphone technology to carry out psychological experiments, allowing them access to millions of participants at the touch of a button.
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Researchers have tapped into smartphone technology to carry out psychological experiments, allowing them access to millions of participants at the touch of a button.
Instead of bringing people into laboratories to study the internal mental processes involved in how humans remember, think, speak, and solve problems, researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London joined an international team to launch an iPhone / iPad app that people can download for free in seven languages as part of the biggest international experiment of its kind.
With the number of iPhone users worldwide expected to exceed one billion by 2013 the researchers wanted to find out if they were able to utilise this market to revolutionise research in cognitive science.
The scientists used an original lab-based experiment and adapted it for use on an iPhone. The results are published in the journal PLoS ONE.
Professor Kathy Rastle, from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, explains: "We wanted to find out if we could harness the precision of these mini computers to conduct experiments on a global scale that involve unprecedented numbers of participants. Results collected so far are strikingly similar to those obtained in laboratory conditions, demonstrating the potential for capitalising on this technology in the future."
She added: "It could change the way that human social and psychological research is conducted because it allows us to access vast numbers of individuals from a range of demographics relatively inexpensively. We managed to test almost 5,000 participants in a period of three months, which would have taken years in a lab and incurred very substantial costs."
The app, called the "Science XL: Test your word power," tests the participants word power by asking them to decide whether each word presented is a real word or a non-word. The application measures accuracy and importantly the time taken to make such decisions, i.e reaction time.
This task has historically provided considerable insight into the cognitive processes involved in skilled reading as well as reading impairments such as dyslexia, through measuring millisecond-level response time and accuracy in deciding if a letter string is a word or not.
The app is free to download from iTunes AppStore (search for "Science XL") and is non-profit making.
For more information on how to get involved visit: http://www.sciencexl.org/home/english
Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Royal Holloway London. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
- Stephane Dufau, Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, Carmen Moret-Tatay, Aileen McGonigal, David Peeters, F.-Xavier Alario, David A. Balota, Marc Brysbaert, Manuel Carreiras, Ludovic Ferrand, Maria Ktori, Manuel Perea, Kathy Rastle, Olivier Sasburg, Melvin J. Yap, Johannes C. Ziegler, Jonathan Grainger. Smart Phone, Smart Science: How the Use of Smartphones Can Revolutionize Research in Cognitive Science. PLoS ONE, 2011; 6 (9): e24974 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0024974
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