Article published In:
The Mental LexiconVol. 14:1 (2019) ► pp.152–168
Methodological and analytic considerations
No lab, no problem
Designing lexical comprehension and production experiments using PsychoPy3
We present new opportunities for psycholinguistic research that are made available by presenting experiments online over the web. We focus on PsychoPy3, which is a new version of a system for the development and delivery of behavioural experiments. Crucially, it allows for both these functions to be performed online. We note that experiments delivered over the web have significant efficiency advantages. They also open up new opportunities to increase the ecological validity of experiments and to facilitate the participation of members of populations that have thus far been less studied in the psycholinguistic literature. We discuss the crucial matter of millisecond timing in online experiments. The technical details of implementation of a behavioural psycholinguistic experiment are presented, along with listings of additional technical resources and support. Our overall evaluation is that although online experimentation still has technical challenges and improvements are ongoing, it may well represent the future of behavioural psycholinguistic research.
Keywords: PsychoPy, PsychoPy3, online experiments, lexical processing
Article outline
- Online experiments can change the psycholinguistics research landscape
- Experimenter impact: Inclusivity, cost effectiveness, time efficiency, and collaboration
- Participant impact: Inclusivity, empowerment, partnership
- Potential impact on the course of the field: Ecological validity, new questions and issues
- What is PyschoPy3 and what can it do?
- How much coding ability is required?
- An illustrative example: Lexical decision task
- Matters of technical practicality
- Stimulus timing
- Response timing
- Driving the system to failure
- What is new in PsychoPy3?
- Embedded links
- Functionality
- Pavlovia
- Discussion and conclusions
- Best practice suggestion 1: Pilot on multiple machines on multiple browsers
- Best practice suggestion 2: Provide additional detailed instructions
- Best practice suggestion 3: Compensate with questionnaire items
- Conclusion: Is the future online?
- Acknowledgements
-
References
References
Bargh, J. A. & McKenna, Y. A.
(2004) The internet and social life. Annual Review of Psychology, 55:1, 573–590. 
Berkowitz, L. & Donnerstein, E.
(1982) External validity is more than skin deep: Some answers to criticisms of laboratory experiments. American Psychologist, 37(3), 245–257.
Brunswik, E.
(1955) Representative design and probabilistic theory in a functional psychology. Psychological Review, 621, 193–217.
Cattell, J. M.
(1886) The time it takes to see and name objects. Mind, 11(41), 63–65.
Harre, R., & Secord, P. F.
(1972) The explanation of social behaviour. Oxford, England: Blackwell.
Meyer, D. E., & Schvaneveldt, R. W.
(1971) Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words: Evidence of a dependence between retrieval operations. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 901, 227–234.
Peirce, J. W.
(2007) PsychoPy – Psychophysics software in Python. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 1621, 8–13.
Peirce, J. W., & MacAskill, M. R.
(2018) Building Experiments in PsychoPy. London: Sage.
Pierce, J. W., Gray, J. R., Simpson, S., MacAskill, M. R., Höchenberger, R., Sogo, H., Kastman, E., Lindeløv, J.
(2019) PsychoPy2: experiments in behavior made easy. Behavior Research Methods.
Peirce, J. W.
(2009) Generating stimuli for neuroscience using PsychoPy. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, 21, 10.
Speed, L., Wnuk, E., & Majid, A.
(2017) Studying psycholinguistics outside the lab. In A. M. B. de Groot and P. Hoogart (eds), Research Methods in Psycholinguistics and the Neurobiology of Language: A Practical Guide (pp. 190–207). John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.
Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
Cecchetti, Gabriele, Steffen A. Herff, Christoph Finkensiep, Daniel Harasim & Martin A. Rohrmeier
2022. Hearing functional harmony in jazz: A perceptual study on music-theoretical accounts of extended tonality. Musicae Scientiae ► pp. 102986492211222 ff. 
Eerola, Tuomas, James Armitage, Nadine Lavan & Sarah Knight
2021. Online Data Collection in Auditory Perception and Cognition Research: Recruitment, Testing, Data Quality and Ethical Considerations. Auditory Perception & Cognition 4:3-4 ► pp. 251 ff.
Stark, Kirsten, Cornelia van Scherpenberg, Hellmuth Obrig & Rasha Abdel Rahman
2022. Web-based language production experiments: Semantic interference assessment is robust for spoken and typed response modalities. Behavior Research Methods 55:1 ► pp. 236 ff.
Vogt, Anne, Roger Hauber, Anna K. Kuhlen & Rasha Abdel Rahman
2021. Internet-based language production research with overt articulation: Proof of concept, challenges, and practical advice. Behavior Research Methods 54:4 ► pp. 1954 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 february 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.