Empirica: a virtual lab for high-throughput macro-level experiments
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13428_2020_Article_1535.pdf
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1.66 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f7260ec2c755c7d85e5a068f5cde4642
Author(s)
Almaatouq, Abdullah
Becker, Joshua
Houghton, James P
Paton, Nicolas
Watts, Duncan J
Whiting, Mark E
Date Issued
March 29, 2021
Publisher
Springer US
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Abstract
Virtual labs allow researchers to design high-throughput and macro-level experiments that are not feasible in traditional in-person physical lab settings. Despite the increasing popularity of online research, researchers still face many technical and logistical barriers when designing and deploying virtual lab experiments. While several platforms exist to facilitate the development of virtual lab experiments, they typically present researchers with a stark trade-off between usability and functionality. We introduce Empirica: a modular virtual lab that offers a solution to the usability–functionality trade-off by employing a “flexible defaults” design strategy. This strategy enables us to maintain complete “build anything” flexibility while offering a development platform that is accessible to novice programmers. Empirica’s architecture is designed to allow for parameterizable experimental designs, reusable protocols, and rapid development. These features will increase the accessibility of virtual lab experiments, remove barriers to innovation in experiment design, and enable rapid progress in the understanding of human behavior.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
MIT Connection Science (Research institute)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Computational Science and Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-020-01535-9
