Abstract
Online experiments are growing in popularity. This study aimed to determine the timing accuracy of web technologies and investigate whether they can be used to support high temporal precision psychology experiments. A dynamic sinusoidal grating and flashes were produced by setInterval, CSS3, and requestAnimationFrame (hereafter, rAF) technologies. They were run at normal or real-time priority processing in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Internet Explorer on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Timing accuracies were compared with that of Psychtoolbox which was chosen as gold standard. It was found that rAF with real-time priority had the best timing accuracy compared to the other web technologies and had a similar timing accuracy as Psychtoolbox in traditional experiments in most cases. However, rAF exhibited poor timing accuracy on Linux. Therefore, rAF can be used as technical basis for accuracy of millisecond timing sequences in online experiments, thereby benefiting the psychology field.
Highlights
Internet technology has been becoming progressively more mature, and the experimental methods in many fields are being deeply affected
De Leeuw found that JavaScript, which is used in jsPsych, is an appropriate tool for measuring response time in online behavioral experiments [4]
The period of dynamic sinusoidal gratings was set to 16 frames
Summary
Internet technology has been becoming progressively more mature, and the experimental methods in many fields are being deeply affected. Online experiments are increasingly replacing traditional experiments as the advantages of online experiments are gradually recognized. There are many advantages to online experiments. The experimental conditions are flexible and can be conducted at any time and any place with Internet access. Subjects are not limited to a particular group of people [1]. There are many online software packages and platforms that have been developed; examples are jsPsych, and Lab.js, which are browser-based online experiment tools [2,3]. De Leeuw found that JavaScript, which is used in jsPsych, is an appropriate tool for measuring response time in online behavioral experiments [4]
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