ArticleBehavior research methods2020
Mental chronometry in the pocket? Timing accuracy of web applications on touchscreen and keyboard devices.
Article in Behavior research methods, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 50 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Using Android Smartphones to Collect Precise Measures of Reaction Times to Multisensory Stimuli.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Assessing the reliability of an online measure of the temporal binding window of audiovisual integration.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- PsySuite: An android application designed to perform multimodal psychophysical testing.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Input device matters for measures of behaviour in online experiments.Psychological research · 2024Article
- A jsPsych touchscreen extension for behavioral research on touch-enabled interfaces.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Methodological considerations for behavioral studies relying on response time outcomes through online crowdsourcing platforms.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- jsQuestPlus: A JavaScript implementation of the QUEST+ method for estimating psychometric function parameters in online experiments.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- To BYOD or not: Are device latencies important for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) smartphone cognitive testing?Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Can we measure individual differences in cognitive measures reliably via smartphones? A comparison of the flanker effect across device types and samples.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Disentangling task-selection failures from task-execution failures in task switching: an assessment of different paradigms.Psychological research · 2023Article
- Precise display time measurement in JavaScript for web-based experiments.Behavior research methods · 2023Article
- Collecting big data with small screens: Group tests of children's cognition with touchscreen tablets are reliable and valid.Behavior research methods · 2021Article
- The Predation Game: Does dividing attention affect patterns of human foraging?Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2021Article
- Running Online Behavioral Experiments Using R: Implementation of a Response-Time Decision Making Task as an R-Shiny App.Journal of cognition · 2021Article
- The timing mega-study: comparing a range of experiment generators, both lab-based and online.PeerJ · 2020Article
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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).
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.