PsychExps: An Online Psychology Laboratory

Publisher Summary PsychExps is an online undergraduate laboratory that is currently available for use. Experiments can be conducted and data collected, just as in traditional labs that use experiment packages or other software for conducting experiments in which students participate as subjects. This chapter discusses the rationale for PsychExps, along with an overview of the technology behind PsychExps. It also highlights the future plans of PsychExps. The interactivity afforded by programs that can be run over the Internet has led to a wealth of online activities. Such sites take experimentation on the Web beyond forms-based data collection to true interaction. Among the obvious advantages of Web-based experiments is that they free students from having to come to a fixed site at a fixed time to perform their lab activities. In addition to convenience, ease of access makes it easier to recruit participants, and data collection can be performed in parallel from multiple sites. Web-based experiments make it possible to fit more data gathering into a fixed time period, and perhaps most important, having a single Web-based implementation of an experiment allows data to be pooled across research sites and across time. With data pooling, the types of questions addressed in laboratory work can be answered using large data sets in place of the typical small ones.