The art of wrangling

Abstract

Web-based eye-tracking is more accessible than ever. Researchers can now carry out visual world paradigm studies remotely and access never before tested, multilingual populations via the internet all without the need for an expensive eye-tracker. Web-based eye-tracking, however, requires careful experimental design and extensive data wrangling skills. In this paper, we provide a framework for reproducible, open science visual world paradigm studies using online experiments. We provide step-by-step instructions to building a typical visual world paradigm psycholinguistics study, and walk the reader through a series of data wrangling steps needed to prepare the data for visualization and analysis using the open-source software environment, R. Importantly, we highlight the key decisions researchers need to make and report in order to reproduce an analysis. We demonstrate our approach by carrying out a single change replication of an in-person eye-tracking study by Porretta et al. (2020). We conclude with best practices and recommendations for researchers carrying out bi-/multilingualism web-based visual world paradigm studies.