Psychology Experiment Study Based On Mobile Technology

With the rapid development of mobile technology, by 2015, there will be an estimated two billion smartphone users worldwide. The huge mobile phone holdings provide psychology researchers a completely new way to collect large-scale、heterogeneous data, through these big data and careful design, it is possible to explore psychological questions that are, to date, difficult to study in the traditional lab. Although there are few studies using mobile phones, their forms are based on game, not experiment, and there is also no estimation on the usability and validity of mobile phones on cognitive psychology experiments. Therefore, this study will let subjects use mobile phone to finish a classical experiment task which is about visual short term memory, and explore the usability and validity of mobile phones to be a scientific research tool and the trends of subjects’performance in the time dimension (age and 24 hours in a day). In experiment 1, four subjects used 4 different phones to finish experiment task separately in a day, it lasted six days. he results showed that the differences between phones are significantly less than subjects (p1 = 0.75, p2= 0.74, p3= 0.94, p4= 0.94), which means different phones had non-significant effects on same subject, and we can ignore the difference between phones, focus on the differences between subjects. Experiment 2 and 3 have same task like experiment 1, by releasing the app which is used in this study on the application store, we collected more than 1645 subjects’data in two months. After using Harrell-Davis estimator and shift function to analyze the data, the results showed there are no regular change in the age dimension, because the subjects participated in this study are all over 18 years old, their cognitive ability are considered to be stable; however, the time of day analysis showed that the subjects’performance (correct rate) are decreasing from 1:00 pm, reaching the bottom at 4:00 pm, and then increasing. This kind of trend is same in the studies of efficiency change in one day. This study used pioneering mobile technology for subjects to finish experiment task, by using programming technology to compensate the disadvantage of mobile phones to be a scientific research tool. Current research results confirmed the usability and validity of mobile phones used in the psychology studies, and the advantages of mobiles phones compared with traditional lab experiment, also including the performance are matching with the study on the change of efficiency in a day.