OSWeb for reaction times - long distance

JelleStudentRug

Hi everyone

I was wondering to what extent the reaction times are reliable for a JATOS / online study, where the JATOS server is hosted in the Netherlands, but the participants take the experiment in Bolivia using their mobile phones. To what extent will a difference in latency influence the reaction times?

Best

Jelle

kri

That is a good question and there is no easy answer for this. Their are many influencing factors like local network and how your experiment is setup (how many files it loads and in which way). That said, I wouldn't expect it to be a big problem if you do not stream audio or video or load many pictures during the experiment. As far as I understand OSWeb all files are loaded in the beginning of the experiment. That would mean that your Bolivian participants have to wait a little longer for the experiment to start. But then during the experiment it should behave the same.

sebastiaan

Hi Jelle,

Just to clarify: reaction times are not at all affected by the connection. That being said, obviously there may be other differences between Dutch and Bolivian participants that do affect reaction times, such as how fast the phones are (not in terms of connection but in terms of CPU).

Cheers!

Sebastiaan

Art

Which means one can possibly sacrifice a few trials to measure a simple reaction time for a given participant/hardware configuration and use this as a reference for the condition-related RT's.

sebastiaan

That's actually a very sensible idea.