Online Experiments using jsPsych, psiTurk, and Amazon Mechanical Turk

This half-day tutorial will cover how to build and deploy online experiments using jsPsych, psiTurk, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). jsPsych is an open-source JavaScript library that facilitates building behavioral experiments in a web browser. psiTurk is an open-source Python platform that simplifies the process of running an experiment using AMT. Together, these two software packages reduce the complexity of setting up an online experiment on AMT, enabling researchers with little software programming experience to take advantage of online experiments. By the end of the tutorial, participants will have gained hands-on experience in programming and deploying a basic behavioral experiment on AMT. Researchers in the Cognitive Science community have been using AMT, and online experiments in general, for several years, but the learning curve can be steep for researchers who are not familiar with web development. While some tools exist for certain kinds of simple experiments (e.g. questionnaires), programming more complex experiments with dynamic elements requires knowledge of web-oriented programming. The tools covered in this tutorial simplify the process of programming online experiments, opening up the possibility of conducting online experiments to more researchers in the cognitive science community. Workshops covering AMT (Mason & Suri,2011) and psiTurk (Coenen, Markant, Martin, & McDonnell,2013) have been offered at previous Cognitive Science Society meetings. This tutorial goes one step further by covering jsPsych as well. Together, these tools cover the entire process of assembling and running an online experiment.