Mental chronometry in the pocket? Timing accuracy of web applications on touchscreen and keyboard devices

Web applications can implement procedures for studying the speed of mental processes (mental chronometry) and can be administered via web browsers on most commodity desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. This approach to conducting mental chronometry offers various opportunities, such as increased scale, ease of data collection, and access to specific samples. However, validity and reliability may be threatened by less accurate timing than specialized software and hardware can offer. We examined how accurately web applications time stimuli and register response times (RTs) on commodity touchscreen and keyboard devices running a range of popular web browsers. Additionally, we explored the accuracy of a range of technical innovations for timing stimuli, presenting stimuli, and estimating stimulus duration. The results offer some guidelines as to what methods may be most accurate and what mental chronometry paradigms may suitably be administered via web applications. In controlled circumstances, as can be realized in a lab setting, very accurate stimulus timing and moderately accurate RT measurements could be achieved on both touchscreen and keyboard devices, though RTs were consistently overestimated. In uncontrolled circumstances, such as researchers may encounter online, stimulus presentation may be less accurate, especially when brief durations are requested (of up to 100 ms). Differences in RT overestimation between devices might not substantially affect the reliability with which group differences can be found, but they may affect reliability for individual differences. In the latter case, measurement via absolute RTs can be more affected than measurement via relative RTs (i.e., differences in a participant’s RTs between conditions).