jsPsych Simulation Mode
After I started my job at Cardiff University as a full-time Research Assistant, my primary work was on developing online experiments to study decision-making. As part of my job, I used a lot of front-end tools, specifically a JavaScript framework for designing online experiments, namely jsPsych.
The Problem
While working with jsPsych, I decided that there was something lacking in this open-access framework. The missing piece, for me, was that there was no way to test whether your online experiment was working apart from:
- Going through it manually, which is painstakingly slow and boring
- Writing up experiment-specific code to test various parts, which is hard to generalise and also time-demanding
The Solution
To resolve this, I expanded the jsPsych framework to incorporate a simulation mode, which I shared on GitHub. The creators of the plugin picked up my idea and incorporated it into the framework.
View original GitHub pull request →
Publication
This work ultimately led the original creators of the plugin to write a paper and invited me to collaborate on the final product. The paper was published in Behaviour Research Methods.