Amazon Mechanical Turk

Relevant Papers

Conducting behavioral research on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk by Winter Mason & Siddharth Suri should be a standard reading for anyone conducting mturk experiments in the lab.

Example MTurk Experiments

• Artificial Language Learning

• Written recall

• Phonetic perception/adaptation

• Norming

• Syntactic priming

• Self paced reading (run with modified IBex)

• an example of spoken recording as soon as we have it

Standard Practices

Always include the following text near where you link to the consent form:

• Sometimes it can happen that technical difficulties cause experimental scripts to freeze so that you will not be able to submit a HIT. We are trying our best to avoid these problems. Should they nevertheless occur, we urge you to contact us.

Also include this blurb (including the link to the blog):

• If you are interested in hearing how the experiments you are participating in help us to understand the human brain, feel free to subscribe to our lab blog on which we announce new findings. Note that typically about one year passes before an experiment is published.

Tips

Audio

If you intend to play audio, keep in mind that not all browsers support the same formats within the <audio> tag. Make sure to provide multiple <source> tags within your <audio> block, in the order you'd prefer the browser choose them, e.g.

<audio>
    <source src="foo.m4a" type="audio/mp4" />
    <source src="foo.ogg" type="audio/ogg" />
    <source src="foo.mp3" type="audio/mpeg" />
    <source src="foo.wav" type="audio/wav" />
    Your browser does not support the audio element.
</audio>

Use as many or few as you need to get full coverage, or at least coverage for all the browsers you care about.

Here is a table of current levels of support in the major browsers:

To convert a wav to mp3:

lame --resample 22.05 -b 64 foo.wav foo.mp3

To convert a wav to m4a:

ffmpeg -y -i foo.wav -acodec libfaac -ab 64k foo.m4a

To convert a wav to ogg:

ffmpeg -i foo.wav -acodec libvorbis -ab 64k foo.ogg

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