Abstract
Online developmental psychology studies are still in their infancy, but their role is newly urgent in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the suspension of in-person research. Are online studies with infants a suitable stand-in for laboratory-based studies? Across two unmonitored online experiments using a change-detection looking-time paradigm with 96 7-month-old infants, we found that infants did not exhibit measurable sensitivities to the basic shape information that distinguishes between 2D geometric forms, as had been observed in previous laboratory experiments. Moreover, while infants were distracted in our online experiments, such distraction was nevertheless not a reliable predictor of their ability to discriminate shape information. Our findings suggest that the change-detection paradigm may not elicit infants’ shape discrimination abilities when stimuli are presented on small, personal computer screens because infants may not perceive two discrete events with only one event displaying uniquely changing information that draws their attention. Some developmental paradigms used with infants, even those that seem well-suited to the constraints and goals of online data collection, may thus not yield results consistent with the laboratory results that rely on highly controlled settings and specialized equipment, such as large screens. As developmental researchers continue to adapt laboratory-based methods to online contexts, testing those methods online is a necessary first step in creating robust tools and expanding the space of inquiry for developmental science conducted online.
Highlights
Online studies with adults have been around in psychological research for many years, and many web-based solutions have been validated for adult testing (Buhrmester et al, 2011; Crump et al, 2013; de Leeuw et al, 2014; Gureckis et al, 2016; Sauter et al, 2020)
To further understand how the results from Dillon et al.’s (2020) laboratory study compared to our present online study, we explored the possibility that infants were distracted in the home environments and that this distraction affected infants’ ability to detect subtle shape changes in rapidly presented displays of 2D figures
We found that the number of times that infants were distracted during the stimuli presentation negatively correlated with their ability to detect shape changes
Summary
Online studies with adults have been around in psychological research for many years, and many web-based solutions have been validated for adult testing (Buhrmester et al, 2011; Crump et al, 2013; de Leeuw et al, 2014; Gureckis et al, 2016; Sauter et al, 2020). Because infants and young children cannot read the instructions and click through web-based tasks unsupervised, different solutions have been proposed for collecting developmental data online. Online platforms for unmoderated developmental research (Scott et al, 2017; Scott and Schulz, 2017; Rhodes et al, 2020; Lo et al, 2021); present detailed instructions addressed to parents or guardians allowing them to participate with their children from their home computer with a webcam, without the experimenter present and without an appointment. Several questions naturally arise: Is there a difference between online and in-laboratory results? Are there comparative advantages or unique limitations to either context? can we ask new questions that the space of inquiry has expanded?
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