By running psychological experiments over the internet, we can test many more simultaneous participants than would be possible in an ordinary laboratory setting. This allows us to design iterative research programmes that quickly test many perspectives on the same problem; it also allows us to implement innovative scenarios that depend on interactions between many simultaneous participants, for example social network or cultural evolution studies.
We have developed some sophisticated software for running these kinds of experiments over the internet. One such piece of software is psychTestR, a framework in the programming language R that we used to develop an extensive range of music individual differences and ability tests, many of which now form the basis of the LongGold educational research project.
More recently, we have developed PsyNet, a more ambitious framework in Python that supports a greater degree of automation (e.g. automatic server deployment, participant recruitment) as well as very complex study designs (e.g. multiplayer games, social network experiments).
Related Publications
- Timbral effects on consonance disentangle psychoacoustic mechanisms and suggest perceptual origins for musical scales Nature Communications (2024)
- Large-scale iterated singing experiments reveal oral transmission mechanisms underlying music evolution Current Biology (2023)
- Gibbs Sampling with People Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2020)
- psychTestR: An R package for designing and conducting behavioural psychological experiments The Journal of Open Source Software (2020)