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

Consent form blurb (always make sure it links to the current version of the consent form):

<div id="consent">
    By accepting this HIT, you confirm that you have read and understood the
    <a target="_blank" href="http://www.hlp.rochester.edu/consent/English_2013-05-13.pdf">consent form</a>,
    that you are willing to participate in this experiment, and that you
    agree that the data you provide by participating can be used in
    scientific publications (no identifying information will be used).
    Sometimes it is necessary to share the data elicited from you
    &mdash; including sound files &mdash; with other researchers for scientific
    purposes (for replication purposes). That is the only reason for
    which we will share data and we will only share data with other
    researchers and only if it is for non-commercial use. Identifying
    information will <span style="font-weight:bold;">never</span> be shared (your MTurk ID will be replaced
    with an arbitrary alphanumeric code).
</div>

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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