Holos: A collaborative environment for similarity-based holistic approaches

Abstract

Through this article, we aim to introduce Holos-a new collaborative environment that allows researchers to carry out experiments based on similarity assessments between stimuli, such as in projective-mapping and sorting tasks. An important feature of Holos is its capacity to assess real-time individual processes during the task. Within the Holos environment, researchers can design experiments on its platform, which can handle four kinds of stimuli: concepts, images, sounds, and videos. In addition, researchers can share their study resources within the scientific community, including stimuli, experimental protocols, and/or the data collected. With a dedicated Android application combined with a tactile human-machine interface, subjects can perform experiments using a tablet to obtain similarity measures between stimuli. On the tablet, the stimuli are displayed as icons that can be dragged with one finger to position them, depending on the ways they are perceived. By recording the x,y coordinates of the stimuli while subjects move the icons, the obtained data can reveal the cognitive processes of the subjects during the experiment. Such data, named digit-tracking data, can be analyzed with the SensoMineR package. In this article, we describe how researchers can design an experiment, how subjects can perform the experiment, and how digit-tracking data can be statistically analyzed within the Holos environment. At the end of the article, a short exemplary experiment is presented.

Q-SpAM: How to Efficiently Measure Similarity in Online Research

“…For research projects that require similarity data from a large and diverse participant sample, we argue that online spatial arrangement is a promising venue. Lê, Brard, and Lê (2017) provided Holos, a free Android app with which participants can spatially arrange target words, images, sounds, or videos on their tablet. Holos saves each target's path and final destination on a freely accessible server on which researchers can share their study templates.…”

Assessing consumer-perceived food quality using conjoint analysis

“…All the subjects are asked to complete the sorting task first, then the quality rating task. In terms of collecting data, both the sorting and quality rating task were performed by using Holos environment [9]. Subjects conducted experiment using a tablet device: stimuli were displayed as icons that could be dragged with a finger.…”