Psy 302-041 Cognitive Research Techniques

Cecilia Martinez Burr

Psy 302-041: Psychological Research Techniques

Fall 2016

October 27, 2016

JAR #3

Title

U Can Touch This: How Tablets Can Be Used to Study Cognitive Development

Introduction

The general topic of the article was to examine the methodological gap in developmental research by testing the viability of using touch screen tablets in the study of cognitive development. Previous research on this issue tested the general viability of tablets in developmental cognitive research in children aged 1-4 by utilizing presentations on a web-technology-based tablet using a storybook method and an eye-tracking paradigm. Their results showed that the tablet based method proved more reliability than other methods and proved as a viable

Children were mainly recruited through visits to day care centers, kindergartens and schools in the Rhein-Ruhr area in Germany and adults recruited from Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Six data sets were conducted and collected through independent tablet-based cognitive experiments between the participants. Each participant was given a tablet with a browser or a tablet with a combination of HTML and JavaScript and the data set was acquired through a variety of perception, learning, and memory tasks, including sorting tasks, 2-alternative forced choice (2AFC) memory tasks, 2AFC-perception tasks, a visual search task, an extinction learning paradigm and a task for assessing spatio-temporal accuracy. Furthermore, each study included adults but the ages of the children were dependent on the level of difficult of each

It was also found that with response time, it was linearly improved over age until the age of 9 or 10, at which point they performed at the speed and accuracy of adults. This methodology also supported that utilizing tablets allowed implantation of experiments quickly and easily, and allowing the researchers to publish the experiments online which allowed participants to have access to the studies online. Furthermore, tablet usage allows for more participation in younger children. The findings in this study supported the notion that tablets appear to be a promising tool with which to gather experimental data and begin to close the methodological gap often encountered in testing of young children in developmental psychology. However, there are still concerns about data security, measurement reliability, and the need for reliable Internet