A Global Perspective on Testing Infants Online: Introducing ManyBabies-AtHome

Abstract

Online testing holds great promise for infant scientists. It could increase participant diversity, improve reproducibility and collaborative possibilities, and reduce costs for researchers and participants. However, despite the rise of platforms and participant databases, little work has been done to overcome the challenges of making this approach available to researchers across the world. In this paper, we elaborate on the benefits of online infant testing from a global perspective and identify challenges for the international community that have been outside of the scope of previous literature. Furthermore, we introduce ManyBabies-AtHome, an international, multi-lab collaboration that is actively working to facilitate practical and technical aspects of online testing as well as address ethical concerns regarding data storage and protection, and cross-cultural variation. The ultimate goal of this collaboration is to improve the method of testing infants online and make it globally available.

Comparing Online Webcam- and Laboratory-Based Eye-Tracking for the Assessment of Infants’ Audio-Visual Synchrony Perception

“…Online eyetracking and behavioral studies with infants can help to reduce data collection time and costs for researchers and participants (Tran et al, 2017;Semmelmann and Weigelt, 2018) and enhance replicability, reproducibility, and generalizability in developmental science (Rhodes et al, 2020;Visser et al, 2021). Our work will also inform future initiatives that aim to replicate in-lab studies with infants online and establish collaborations for large-scale, global online experiments (Frank et al, 2017;Byers-Heinlein et al, 2020;Sheskin et al, 2020;The ManyBabies Consortium, 2020;Zaadnoordijk et al, 2021).…”

Bringing Home Baby Euclid: Testing Infants’ Basic Shape Discrimination Online

“…Online studies with adults have been around in psychological research for many years, and many web-based solutions have been validated for adult testing ( Buhrmester et al, 2011 ; Crump et al, 2013 ; de Leeuw et al, 2014 ; Gureckis et al, 2016 ; Sauter et al, 2020 ). Online studies with infants and children, however, are a relatively recent development that became newly urgent in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the suspension of in-person research ( Lourenco and Tasimi, 2020 ; Sheskin et al, 2020 ; Zaadnoordijk et al, 2021 ). Because infants and young children cannot simply read the instructions and click through web-based tasks unsupervised, different solutions have been proposed for collecting developmental data online.…”

Positive emotion enhances conflict processing in preschoolers

“…Participants were excluded if they had more than 50% trials without responses over all conditions, or more than 75% trials without responses within one of the conditions (N = 30, medianage = 3.95 years, range = 2.68-8.35 years, 15 female). Due to the challenges of obtaining high-quality data from children in online task settings (Zaadnoordijk et al, 2021), we decided to lower the preregistered threshold (50% within each condition), in order to achieve an acceptable inclusion rate. Additionally, participants were excluded if their overall accuracy was not significantly above chance according to a binomial test (N=1, age = 3.36 years, female).…”