Research

Introducing the Sample Studies Page

Templates are an excellent way to get started with your research, whether you are a student that’s new to the field or a seasoned researcher that just wants to save some time. Here at Labvanced, we have created and published over 40 examples of popular psychology paradigms to our Public Experiment Libraryopen in new window, but we wanted to curate this list even further. Enter the Sample Studies page!

What is the Sample Studies page?

This page is designed with the best interests of our researchers in mind. It’s organized and searchable, with unique tables of studies for each use case in psychology. Simply point and click to find the best template or add-on for you!

sample studiesFig. 1: The sample studies page.

With the Sample Studies page, you have classic paradigms, demos, and advanced features right at your fingertips! You can use this collection to learn more about the platform or import a study as the foundation for your online experiment.

Paradigms

Paradigms are recreations of classical psychology experiments. Using Labvanced designs and event logic, these tried-and-true studies are ready for you to use! Find studies such as the Asch Paradigm, Stroop Tasks, N-back tasks, and more. Paradigms are sorted into tables by use cases.

Some of our most popular paradigms include:

  • The Ebbinghaus Illusion: participants must adjust the size of a circle to match the perceived size of another circle.
  • Posner Cueing Task: participants will make a response depending on which of two boxes an "X" appears in while a cue appears as a distraction.
  • Preferential Looking Task: children are asked to freely view sets of objects (using eye tracking) and then rate how much they enjoyed each object.

Areas of Psychology / Use Cases

If you have a specific area of interest, you can find an experiment template for it! There are 7 Labvanced psychology use casesopen in new window:

  • Behavioral
  • Personality & Social
  • Cognitive & Neuro
  • Developmental & Educational
  • Clinical & Health
  • Marketing & Consumer
  • Sports & Movement

Each use case is represented by a table, which makes it easier for you to find the perfect study. When you are looking at studies within your field of research, you can then refine your search by keywords.

cognitive tableFig. 2: The Cognitive & Neuro Psychology use case table.

The page also includes separate sections for other studies and useful concepts, called Demos and Add-Ons.

Demos

Demos are studies that walk you through a specific feature, object, or event structure. These studies are unique to Labvanced, so you won’t find these anywhere else! The format of these studies is purely instructional.

A demo for creating and using random factors to randomize variables in a study.Fig. 3: Random Factors Demoopen in new window, Study ID 27176

Check out some of these handy demos:

  • Data Frames: Instructions for using data frames to associate text with an image in a few simple steps.
  • Assign Multiple Stimuli to Trials: Instructions for assigning multiple stimuli to different trials simultaneously.
  • Longitudinal Study: Instructions for creating a longitudinal study.

These demos, as well as many others, can be found in the Demos table of the sample studies page.

Add-Ons

Add-Ons are studies that are not reproductions of psychology paradigms. Instead, they are helpful tasks that you can download and add to your existing studies. For example, we have several different kinds of bot checks that can be added in between the tasks of your study to check and see if your participants are paying attention:

An add-on study for assessing participant attention with a specific instruction task.Fig. 4: Rating Scale Bot Checkopen in new window, Study ID 34561

The goal here is to share useful and advanced Labvanced experiment tricks or features that can address complex problems and help make your study more creative and powerful.

A few more examples of add-ons include:

  • Huggins Pitch Headphone Screening: Based on the ChaitLab Huggins Pitch Headphone Check, participants must identify the hidden warble within one of 3 tones.
  • Choose the Color - Bot Check: Participants must correctly select the word that represents a color from a list of other words.
  • Psychology Studies with Labvanced: Three common psychology paradigms that study a participant's attention, namely examples of the visual oddball, selective attention, and attentional blink tasks.

All of these studies and more can be found in the Add-Ons table on the Sample Studies page.

Why do we offer so many templates?

Templates are extremely useful and can save you lots of time and energy. All of our studies are not only viewable, but downloadable as well. When you download a template, it will appear in your account pre-loaded with stimuli, programmed events, and functional experiment logic. No coding or processing required!

The imported Posner cueing taskFig 5: The Study Design tab after importing the Posner Cueing Task.

These templates are completely free to all users, regardless of license type. You can download as many as you would like, and you can even suggest new templates by sending an email to [email protected].

Prefer to watch a video of this information? Check out our YouTube explanationopen in new window!

Does the world of research need more templates?

There is a debate in psychology about the use of templates. Do we need more templates? Fewer? Are templates procedural and lazy, or are they helpful and thought-provoking? We agree with the later stance - that templates are the foundation from which we can grow and stretch ourselves as researchers and sophisticated thinkers.

On the subject of this discourse, Davide Ravasi writes that we should be “shifting the discussion from “Are templates good or bad?” to “How can templates be used more effectively?” To read more about this viewpoint, see his commentary in this documentopen in new window available from University College London.

Our Sample Studies page is our contribution to this topic as we make a commitment to help students and researchers get the most out of experimental design.

What do researchers have to say about our templates?

  • “Do not hesitate to look for experiments before developing your own scripts.”

  • “Grab one of the templates and try to reproduce it, understand how and why that study was done. That’s the starting point, it’s clear and helps you get going.”

  • “Check out the public library of studies. Use that community to see what other people are doing and explore lots of interests!”

For Reference

Gioia, D., Corley, K., Eisenhardt, K., Feldman, M., Langley, A., Lê, J., ... & Welch, C. (2022). A Curated Debate: On Using “Templates” in Qualitative Research. Journal of Management Inquiry, 10564926221098955.