NSF POSE: Phase II: An open-source ecosystem for behavioral experiments

This project creates an open-source ecosystem for behavioral experiments centered around jsPsych, an established and highly-used tool for behavioral research. An ecosystem for behavioral experiments will allow researchers to make their methodological innovations open-source products that can be adapted by other researchers to answer new questions. The goal is to make all kinds of research on human behavior faster, more transparent, more collaborative, and cheaper. The ecosystem created around this software allows researchers to develop and share innovations in this rapidly changing space. It lowers the barriers to access research resources, allowing researchers to run online experiments, facilitating the use of high-impact approaches like citizen science, and reducing the amount of redundant effort that researchers do when creating these experiments. Facilitating research that is built on free and open-source research will accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, multiplying the broader impacts of that work. jsPsych is already used for research that informs social and educational programs and policies, product design, therapies, training and development of artificial intelligence, and many other areas. Online experiments are a powerful tool for cognitive and behavioral research in behavioral economics, human-computer interaction, linguistics, and all branches of psychology. The project will also train dozens of researchers to contribute to open-source software development, building scientific workforce capacity that can be applied to a broader range of projects. This project grows the open-source ecosystem through several complementary activities. It brings together experts and tool developers who use a variety of online experiment methods to coordinate around a shared framework. For this shared framework, the project creates policies and tools that facilitate shared governance, ensuring that the ecosystem is sustainable. To make it easier for researchers to contribute to development of the software, the project builds developer-focused tools, improves documentation, and conducts both live and remote hackathons for training. To ensure that the software developed by the community is robust and secure, the project develops plans for software testing and verification before public release. Finally, the project includes activities that will permit researchers to provide input on the direction of the project. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.