Online Developmental Science to Foster Innovation, Access, and Impact

Sheskin, Mark; Scott, Kimberly; Mills, Candice M.; Bergelson, Elika; Bonawitz, Elizabeth; Spelke, Elizabeth S.; Li, Feifei; Keil, Frank C.; Gweon, Hyowon; Tenenbaum, Joshua B.; Jara‐Ettinger, Julian; Adolph, Karen E.; Rhodes, Marjorie; Frank, Michael C.; Mehr, Samuel A.; Schulz, Laura

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2020.06.004

Cited by 91 publications

(89 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Overall, we believe our results demonstrate that it is not only possible, but relatively straightforward, to collect high-quality value-based decision-making data from children, adolescents, and adults via online task administration. Our study adds to the growing literature examining online testing as a way to extend and replicate in-lab developmental findings, which have often relied on small and geographically constrained samples of participants Sheskin et al, 2020). Critically, we find that online testing can be used not just to administer short experiments, but also lengthier tasks that require sustained focus and many, repeated decisions, even in children as young as 8 years old.…”

Section: Discussion Discussionmentioning

confidence: 66%

“…We also observed a main effect of continuous age (ps < . 001), such that in all three datasets, older participants were increasingly likely to repeat first-stage choices, regardless of their outcomes. Most relevant to our primary question of interest, we also observed a significant reward x transition x age interaction effect, indicating an age-related increase in model-based learning (ps < .002).…”

Section: Results Resultsmentioning

confidence: 92%

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

Nussenbaum

Scheuplein

Phaneuf

et al. 2020

Collabra: Psychology

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For years, adult psychological research has benefitted from web-based data collection. There is growing interest in harnessing this approach to facilitate data collection from children and adolescents to address foundational questions about cognitive development. To date, however, few studies have directly tested whether findings from in-lab developmental psychology tasks can be replicated online, particularly in the domain of value-based learning and decision-making. To address this question, we set up a pipeline for online data collection with children, adolescents, and adults, and conducted a replication of Decker et al. (2016). The original in-lab study employed a sequential decision-making paradigm to examine shifts in value-learning strategies from childhood to adulthood. Here, we used the same paradigm in a sample of 151 children (N = 50; ages 8 - 12 years), adolescents (N = 50; ages 13 - 17 years), and adults (N = 51; ages 18 - 25 years) and replicated the main finding that the use of a “model-based” learning strategy increases with age. In addition, we adapted a new index of abstract reasoning (MaRs-IB; Chierchia et al. 2019) for use online, and replicated a key result from Potter et al. (2017), which found that abstract reasoning ability mediated the relation between age and model-based learning. Our re-analyses of two previous in-lab datasets alongside our analysis of our online dataset revealed few qualitative differences across task administrations. These findings suggest that with appropriate precautions, researchers can effectively examine developmental differences in learning computations through unmoderated, online experiments.

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Section: Discussion Discussionmentioning

confidence: 66%

Section: Results Resultsmentioning

confidence: 92%

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

Nussenbaum

Scheuplein

Phaneuf

et al. 2020

Collabra: Psychology

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“…Many labs are making progress on reducing the technological and logistical challenges of remote research in developmental science. We have focused here on an unmoderated approach primarily for verbal children, but others are also pioneering approaches for unmoderated research with infants and methods for remote research that use video-conferencing to preserve interaction with live experimenters (Gweon, Sheskin, Chuey, & Merrick, 2020;Sheskin & Keil, 2018;Sheskin et al, 2020). There is great potential to advance the field with large-scale collaborative approaches to developing these new methodological tools (Sheskin et al, 2020).…”

Section: Unmoderated Remote Research and The Future Of The Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We have focused here on an unmoderated approach primarily for verbal children, but others are also pioneering approaches for unmoderated research with infants and methods for remote research that use video-conferencing to preserve interaction with live experimenters (Gweon, Sheskin, Chuey, & Merrick, 2020;Sheskin & Keil, 2018;Sheskin et al, 2020). There is great potential to advance the field with large-scale collaborative approaches to developing these new methodological tools (Sheskin et al, 2020). It is our hope that remote research can help the field address new research questions and advance science in ways that might not otherwise be possible, both when in-person research is restricted and more generally as we move forward as a field.…”

Section: Unmoderated Remote Research and The Future Of The Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Advancing Developmental Science via Unmoderated Remote Research with Children

Rhodes

Rizzo

Foster‐Hanson

et al. 2020

Journal of Cognition and Development

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118

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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

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“…This demonstrates that remote infant data collection with fully automatized tasks can be as efficient and reliable as in situ lab assessments. High quality data through remote administration is not only an important enabler during this time of the global COVID-19 pandemic, but also provide a promising avenue for data collection associated with developmental research, with increased speed, lowered cost, and the potential to an improved sample diversity by reaching to a wider socio-demographic background than traditional lab-based research (Sheskin et al, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tablet Assessment of Word Comprehension Reveals Coarse Word Representations in 18-20-month-old Toddlers

Lo¹,

Rosslund²,

Chai³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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The present study explores the viability of using tablets in assessing early word comprehension by means of a two-alternative forced-choice task. Forty-nine 18-20-month-old Norwegian toddlers performed a touch-based word recognition task, in which they were prompted to identify the labelled target out of two displayed items on a touchscreen tablet. In each trial, the distractor item was either semantically related (e.g., dog-cat) or unrelated (e.g., dog-airplane) to the target. Our results show that toddlers as young as 18 months can engage meaningfully with a tablet-based assessment, with minimal verbal instruction and child–administrator interaction. Toddlers performed better in the semantically unrelated condition than in the related condition, suggesting that their word representations are still semantically coarse at this age. Furthermore, parental reports of comprehension, using the Norwegian version of the MacArthur Bates Communicative Development Inventories, predicted toddlers’ performance, with parent-child agreement stronger in the semantically unrelated condition, suggesting that parents declare a word to be known by their child if it is understood at a coarse representational level. This study provides among the earliest evidence that remote data collection in infants before their second birthday is viable, as comparable results were observed from both in-lab and online administration of the touch-screen recognition task.

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Online Developmental Science to Foster Innovation, Access, and Impact

Cited by 91 publications

References 16 publications

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

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

Advancing Developmental Science via Unmoderated Remote Research with Children

Tablet Assessment of Word Comprehension Reveals Coarse Word Representations in 18-20-month-old Toddlers

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