Online psychophysics: reaction time effects in cognitive experiments

Web-based vs. controlled environment psychophysics experiments

Web-based experiments, legibility, readability A recent trend in psychophysics experiments related to image quality is to perform the experiments on the World Wide Web with a large number of observers instead of in a laboratory under controlled conditions. This method assumes that the large number of participants involved in a Web investigation “averages out” the parameters that the experiments...

QRTEngine: An easy solution for running online reaction time experiments using Qualtrics

Performing online behavioral research is gaining increased popularity among researchers in psychological and cognitive science. However, the currently available methods for conducting online reaction time experiments are often complicated and typically require advanced technical skills. In this article, we introduce the Qualtrics Reaction Time Engine (QRTEngine), an open-source JavaScript engin...

Visual attention: Neurophysiology, psychophysics and cognitive neuroscience

The appeal of visual attention and the attraction towards its study might be related to the unsettling observation, for a traditional vision scientist, that changing an observer’s internal attentional state while keeping the retinal image unchanged can have such dramatic effects on ‘sensory’ neurons throughout visual cortex and on perceptual performance. Adding to the appeal is the tantalizing ...

Experiments with Online Reinforcement Learning in Real-Time Strategy Games

Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games provide a challenging platform to implement online reinforcement learning (RL) techniques in a real application. Computer as one player monitors opponents’ (human or other computers) strategies and then updates its own policy using RL methods. In this paper, we firstly examine the suitability of applying the online RL in various computer games. RL application depe...

Memory-scanning: mental processes revealed by reaction-time experiments.