Abstract
Substantial recent research has examined the accuracy of presentation durations and response time measurements for visually presented stimuli in Web-based experiments, with a general conclusion that accuracy is acceptable for most kinds of experiments. However, many areas of behavioral research use auditory stimuli instead of, or in addition to, visual stimuli. Much less is known about auditory accuracy using standard Web-based testing procedures. We used a millisecond-accurate Black Box Toolkit to measure the actual durations of auditory stimuli and the synchronization of auditory and visual presentation onsets. We examined the distribution of timings for 100 presentations of auditory and visual stimuli across two computers with difference specs, three commonly used browsers, and code written in either Adobe Flash or JavaScript. We also examined different coding options for attempting to synchronize the auditory and visual onsets. Overall, we found that auditory durations were very consistent, but that the lags between visual and auditory onsets varied substantially across browsers and computer systems.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13428-016-0758-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Substantial recent research has examined the accuracy of presentation durations and response time measurements for visually presented stimuli in Web-based experiments, with a general conclusion that accuracy is acceptable for most kinds of experiments
Performance was significantly better in the lab condition than the Web condition; the correlation between item-level identification accuracy in the two conditions was very high (r = .89). (Similar correlations between lab- and Web-based auditory identification performance with have been reported by Cooke, Barker, Garcia Lecumberri, & Wasilewski, 2011.) Most interestingly, the correlation between lexical decision times across the two conditions was very high (r = .86)
The basic designs of all studies were identical: We aimed to present a visual stimulus and an auditory stimulus (a 1000-Hz sine wave1) on the screen for 1,000 ms, 1 We chose to use a sine wave as our auditory stimulus for simplicity, and consistency with previous research
Summary
Substantial recent research has examined the accuracy of presentation durations and response time measurements for visually presented stimuli in Web-based experiments, with a general conclusion that accuracy is acceptable for most kinds of experiments. As much research is conducted online, many researchers have examined the extent to which experiments requiring accurate presentation durations or RTs are feasible using standard Web-based technologies such as Adobe Flash and JavaScript (for an overview of the various ways of running Web-based RT experiments, see Reimers & Stewart, 2015). The second broad approach has been to compare directly the accuracy of browser-based stimulus presentation and RT recording using specialist software or hardware (e.g., Neath, Earle, Hallett, & Surprenant, 2011; Reimers & Stewart, 2015; Schubert et al, 2013; Simcox & Fiez, 2014). It reflects a focus in cognitive psychology directed more toward visual rather than auditory perception and processing. (To illustrate, in the UK, the core introductory cognitive psychology textbooks have several chapters on aspects of visual processing, but only a few pages on auditory perception.)
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