The role of memory and perspective shifts in systematic biases during object location estimation

Segen, Vladislava, Wiener, Jan and Slattery, Tim (2021) The role of memory and perspective shifts in systematic biases during object location estimation.

Online data collection offers a wide range of benefits including access to larger and more diverse populations, together with a reduction in the experiment cycle. Here we compare performance in a spatial memory task, in which participants had to estimate object locations following viewpoint shifts, using data from a controlled lab-based setting and from an unsupervised online sample. We found that the data collected in a conventional laboratory setting and those collected online produced very similar results, although the online data was more variable with standard errors being about 10% larger than those of the data collected in the lab. Overall, our findings suggest that spatial memory studies using static images can be successfully carried out online with unsupervised samples. However, given the higher variability of the online data, it is recommended that the sample size should be increased by at least 25% in the data collected online, as this would allow to achieve similar standard errors to those obtained in the lab