A silently rising star in the world of experimental psychology is online experimentation. Studies into the fundamental behavior of humans requires hundreds or thousands of people willing to dedicate only a few minutes of their time to take the experiment. As you can imagine, people are busy and so a lot of powerful studies are shelved simply because not enough people took part.

This is now changing. A small number of labs around the world, including some from Harvard and Cambridge, are starting to put experiments online, available to everyone with a net connection and five minutes to spare - literally! I first got word about this when Joshua Hartshorne, a PhD student at Harvard, emailed me about his latest work. I talked to Josh a bit and man, the science is amazing.

Josh’s lab is looking at visual short-term memory (VSTM). I won’t tell you more because I don’t want to bias you when you participate in his lab’s latest experiments. For some of the experiments, you can find out your results right away. For example, this experiment will tell you approximately how many visual objects you can remember. You probably think that if you were to look briefly at a painting and then close your eyes, you could remember it in detail. It turns out that your memory for such things is actually quite bad. Try the experiment and find out for yourself.

Granted, not all kinds of experiments can be delivered over the web. Naturally, surveys are the lion’s share of this work, but more and more people are designing more complex experiments for web delivery. What all these studies have in common is that they require large numbers of willing participants. If you’re really keen, Hanover College keeps a huge list of these studies.

So is this just a dream? Not quite. Experiments like these have been published in Science and Nature, among others. The latest one I know of was summed up with: "In a Web-based survey, people conclude that anything that has feelings (such as hunger or pride) and the ability to act (such as communicating or showing self-restraint) possesses a mind." In another study, an international collaboration studied the attractiveness of women’s faces, voices, bodies, and odors.

Finally, Josh kindly released a bit of unpublished data for us: in a visual short-term memory experiment, he checked to see if performance improved or worsened with age. Usually the experiment only tests people between 18 and 35 years old because to try to control for age differences. Online, this isn’t a problem, and so Josh got to actually check whether age matters or not, rather than eliminate it as a variable. The result? There is only a weak effect that kicks in around the age of 50 or 60.

So what can you do to help science? Simple. If you have 5 minutes, you can take part in some experiments. Don’t do the experiment more than once (you’ll just burden the researcher) and be yourself. Never try to second guess the experiment!

[tags]psychology, online, experiments, cognition[/tags]