Simulating behavior to help researchers build experiments

de Leeuw, Joshua R., Gilbert, Rebecca A., Petrov, Nikolay and Luchterhandt, Björn 2022. Simulating behavior to help researchers build experiments. Behavior Research Methods 10.3758/s13428-022-01899-0

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

Testing that an experiment works as intended is critical for identifying design problems and catching technical errors that could invalidate the results. Testing is also time-consuming because of the need to manually run the experiment. This makes testing the experiment costly for researchers, and therefore testing is less comprehensive than in other kinds of software development where tools to automate and speed up the testing process are widely used. In this paper, we describe an approach that substantially reduces the time required to test behavioral experiments: automated simulation of participant behavior. We describe how software that is used to build experiments can use information contained in the experiment's code to automatically generate plausible participant behavior. We demonstrate this through an implementation using jsPsych. We then describe four potential scenarios where automated simulation of participant behavior can improve the way researchers build experiments. Each scenario includes a demo and accompanying code. The full set of examples can be found at https://jspsych.github.io/simulation-examples/.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC)
Publisher:	Psychonomic Society
ISSN:	1554-3528
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	12 October 2022
Date of Acceptance:	1 June 2022
Last Modified:	18 Oct 2022 11:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/153320

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item