Advancing Developmental Science via Unmoderated Remote Research with Children

Abstract

This article introduces an accessible approach to implementing unmoderated remote research in developmental science-research in which children and families participate in studies remotely and independently, without directly interacting with researchers. Unmoderated remote research has the potential to strengthen developmental science by: (1) facilitating the implementation of studies that are easily replicable, (2) allowing for new approaches to longitudinal studies and studies of parent-child interaction, and (3) including families from more diverse backgrounds and children growing up in more diverse environments in research. We describe an approach we have used to design and implement unmoderated remote research that is accessible to researchers with limited programming expertise, and we describe the resources we have made available on a new website (discoveriesonline.org) to help researchers get started with implementing this approach. We discuss the potential of this method for developmental science and highlight some challenges still to be overcome to harness the power of unmoderated remote research for advancing the field. The field of cognitive development was founded upon remarkable insights gleaned from everyday interactions with children. Piaget's theory of cognitive development (1954) began with his observations of his own children playing on their mats, dropping things from their highchairs, and playing with marbles. Carey (1985) revolutionized our understanding of how concepts originate and change by analyzing conversations with her own child about birth, the nature of life, and death. The field is full of stories of great theoretical insights made by researchers closely watching children as they crawl around near the sides of high beds (Adolph, Kretch, & LoBue, 2014), negotiate the rules of games among themselves on a playground (Borman, 1981), and try to sit down on way-too-tiny toy tractors (DeLoache, 1987). Of course, the field has never relied on the observations of individual researchers alone. We use these observations to design experiments that recreate the situations in which the behaviors were first observed, which can then be replicated by labs around the world. But still, individual interactions between researchers and their participants have always been central to the field of cognitive development. The notion that we can learn from watching and interacting with children, along with the intriguing challenges of thinking about how to recreate the conditions of everyday life in CONTACT Marjorie Rhodes

Moving Developmental Research Online: Comparing In-Lab and Web-Based Studies of Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

“…Another possibility is that parents interfered with their children's choices during the task, potentially encouraging them to make more "model-based" decisions. We think this is unlikely, as previous research suggests rates of parental interference are low (<1% of trials), even for studies with young children (Rhodes et al, 2020). In addition, this version of the two-step task is designed such that model-free and model-based decisions, on average, yield equivalent reward, such that there would be no reason for parents to encourage a "model-based" strategy.…”

“…One advantage of online testing is that it offers the opportunity to include participants who may be unable to visit the lab in person. This may promote the inclusion of a more diverse and representative group of participants (Leshin et al, 2020;Rhodes et al, 2020). However, there is also concern that online testing may exacerbate existing barriers to research inclusion (Lourenco & Tasimi, 2020).…”

“…Several research groups have recently demonstrated the feasibility of collecting data online from both infants and young children (Rhodes et al, 2020;Scott et al, 2017), without a "live" experimenter present via video chat (e.g., Chuey et al, 2020). However, most of these approaches have involved collecting responses to short animations, in tasks that typically take between 10 and 20 minutes.…”

“…Finally, we were concerned that other people might interfere with participants' completion of the task -parents, for example, might "help" their children make choices, preventing us from accurately assessing children's decisionmaking strategies. Other studies have addressed this concern by recording video data from all participants via their webcams (Rhodes et al, 2020), which experimenters can then code for instances of interference. This tactic, however, in addition to requiring experimenter time, imposes greater demands on the hosting server and raises potential privacy concerns.…”

From Lab to Zoom: Adapting Training Study Methodologies to Remote Conditions

“…Likewise, studies implemented through Discoveries Online, 2 an unmoderated interface designed for verbal children ages three and older, participants make selections on their screen based on study narratives and animations (Rhodes et al, 2020). Although these methods allow families to complete sessions at their convenience, 1 www.lookit.mit.edu 2 www.discoveriesonline.org they do not lend themselves well to tasks requiring the child's active participation, as during Lookit tasks the child simply watches the screen and is not able to interact directly with anything they see, and children participating in studies from Discoveries Online are constrained to actions that can be elicited with little setup and explanation, such as pressing a button on the screen or discussing a story with their parent in a naturalistic setting (Scott and Schulz, 2017;Rhodes et al, 2020). Because there is no live experimenter in either methodology, there is no mechanism in place to ensure that the instructions are followed, the child remains engaged and fixated on the screen, the camera angles stay in focus, and the data upload correctly.…”