Abstract
Online data collection offers a wide range of benefits including access to larger and more diverse populations, together with a reduction in the experiment cycle. Here we compare performance in a spatial memory task, in which participants had to estimate object locations following viewpoint shifts, using data from a controlled lab-based setting and from an unsupervised online sample. We found that the data collected in a conventional laboratory setting and those collected online produced very similar results, although the online data was more variable with standard errors being about 10% larger than those of the data collected in the lab. Overall, our findings suggest that spatial memory studies using static images can be successfully carried out online with unsupervised samples. However, given the higher variability of the online data, it is recommended that the online sample size is increased to achieve similar standard errors to those obtained in the lab. For the current study and data processing procedures, this would require an online sample 25% larger than the lab sample.
Highlights
In recent years, personal computers and the Internet have become widely accessible to most people, from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds
The spatial memory task used in the current study investigates the precision with which object locations are remembered across different perspectives, an ability that supports navigation and orientation by allowing us to recognize previouslyencountered places across different viewpoints [31,32]
For the data analysis Linear Mixed Effects (LME) models were run with the GLME4 package in R (R Studio)
Summary
Personal computers and the Internet have become widely accessible to most people, from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds. This, together with the development of user-friendly experimental presentation platforms, such as Gorilla [1], Testable (testable.org), Pavlovia (pavlovia.org), JATOS (jatos.org), and MindProbe (mindprobe.eu), that support data collection from a wide range of devices (i.e. phones, tablets and computers), has led to increased popularity of online behavior data collection. Recent widespread restrictions on in-person data collection because of the Covid-19 pandemic have encouraged many labs to consider switching to online research. The question we ask here is whether the data collected from online experiments are comparable to those obtained in the lab, at least in the context of spatial memory [2,3].
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