Moving outside the lab: The viability of conducting sensorimotor learning studies online

Abstract

Collecting data online via crowdsourcing platforms has proven to be a very efficient way to recruit individuals from a large diverse sample. While many fields in psychology have embraced online studies, the field of motor learning has lagged behind. We suspect this is because of an implicit assumption that the loss of experimental control with online data collection will be problematic for kinematic data. As a first foray to bring motor learning online, we developed a web-based platform to collect kinematic data, serving as a template for researchers to create their own online sensorimotor control and learning experiments. As a proof-of-concept, we present three visuomotor rotation experiments conducted with this platform, asking if fundamental motor learning phenomena discovered in the lab could be reproduced online. In all experiments, there was a close correspondence between the results obtained online with those previously reported from research conducted in the laboratory. As such, our web-based motor learning platform can serve as a powerful tool to exploit the benefits of crowdsourcing approaches and extend research on motor learning beyond the confines of the traditional laboratory.