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Behavioral experiments with infants are generally costly, and developmental scientists often struggle with recruiting participants. Online experiments are an effective approach to address these issues by offering alternative routes to expand sample sizes and access more diverse populations. However, data collection procedures in online experiments have not been sufficiently established. Differences in procedures between laboratory and online experiments can lead to other issues such as decreased data quality and the need for preprocessing. Moreover, data collection platforms for non-English speaking participants remain scarce. This article introduces the Japanese version of Lookit, a platform dedicated to online looking-time experiments for infants. Lookit is integrated into Children Helping Science, a broader platform for online developmental studies operated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA, USA). In addition, we review the state-of-the-art of automated gaze coding algorithms for infant studies and provide methodological considerations that researchers should consider when conducting online experiments. We hope this article will serve as a starting point for promoting online experiments with young children in Japan and contribute to creating a more robust developmental science.
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Research at a Distance: Replicating Semantic Differentiation Effects Using Remote Data Collection With Children Participants
Remote data collection procedures can strengthen developmental science by addressing current limitations to in-person data collection and helping recruit more diverse and larger samples of participants. Thus, remote data collection opens an opportunity for more equitable and more replicable developmental science. However, it remains an open question whether remote data collection procedures with children participants produce results comparable to those obtained using in-person data collection. This knowledge is critical to integrate results across studies using different data collection procedures. We developed novel web-based versions of two tasks that have been used in prior work with 4-6-year-old children and recruited children who were participating in a virtual enrichment program. We report the first successful remote replication of two key experimental effects that speak to the emergence of structured semantic representations ( N = 52) and their role in inferential reasoning ( N = 40). We discuss the implications of these findings for using remote data collection with children participants, for maintaining research collaborations with community settings, and for strengthening methodological practices in developmental science.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1918259
- PAR ID:
- 10343451
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers in Psychology
- Volume:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 1664-1078
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.697550
