Mobile app crowdsourcing may benefit psychological research

Researchers may be able to crowdsource data with mobile devices to measure cognition, according to the American Psychological Association.

“Mobile devices offer researchers an exciting new means to crowdsource an experiment using games that are actually tests of cognition or other brain functions,” Stephen R. Mitroff, PhD, of Duke University, said in a press release. “Questions that could have taken decades to answer in a laboratory setting, or that could not be realistically answered in a lab, can be examined using big data gathered in a relatively short time.”

Mobile technology may provide a new opportunity to explore cognitive processes on a larger scale, according to Mitroff.

“In 1998, 1 million trials were analyzed by Jeremy M. Wolfe, PhD, of Harvard Medical School, to understand visual search. This was a mind-blowing amount of data that took 10 years to collect.” Mitroff said in the release. “Today, we can collect over a million trials a day through [the mobile app game] Airport Scanner.”

In addition, its use can become a cost-effective way to collect data, according to the press release.