Pavlovia

Pavlovia is a platform and associated set of tools designed to facilitate online behavioral research, particularly in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. It is primarily used in conjunction with PsychoPy, a widely-used open-source software package for creating psychology experiments.

Pavlovia provides a cloud-based infrastructure for hosting experiments designed in PsychoPy, allowing researchers to easily collect data from participants remotely via web browsers. It handles aspects such as participant recruitment (often in conjunction with platforms like Prolific or MTurk), experiment deployment, data storage, and payment of participants.

Key features of Pavlovia include:

• Experiment Hosting: Pavlovia hosts PsychoPy experiments, making them accessible to participants through a web browser.
• Participant Management: It offers features for tracking participant progress, managing participant codes, and handling completion status.
• Data Storage: Data collected during experiments is securely stored on Pavlovia's servers.
• Integration with PsychoPy: Pavlovia is tightly integrated with PsychoPy, allowing researchers to easily upload, manage, and run their experiments.
• Open Science Emphasis: Pavlovia promotes open science practices by encouraging researchers to share their experimental materials and data.

Researchers use Pavlovia to run a wide variety of behavioral experiments online, including studies of perception, attention, memory, language, and decision-making. It lowers the barriers to conducting research by simplifying recruitment and providing a centralized system for data collection and management. It provides infrastructure for both unpaid piloting of studies and fully compensated data collection from diverse participant pools.