A perception experiment with time-critical graphics animation on the World-Wide Web

The World-Wide Web offers a potentially interesting tool to collect data fr om a large and heterogeneous audience. While questionnaires have become rat her common on the Internet, its potential reaches far beyond text processin g. In principle, it is possible not only to perform interactive, dynamic ex periments on the Web, but also to include graphical animation and time-crit ical responses, such as reaction times. We implemented a visual motion extr apolation task on the Web using the programming language Java, which can be interpreted by standard Web browsers such as Netscape or Internet Explorer . The data collected with this method turned out to be reliable and differe d little from data obtained in a controlled laboratory setting, with the ex ception of conditions with fixation instruction. Thus, the Web can, general ly speaking, be used for data collection of large sample sizes. The strengt hs and weaknesses of dynamic visual simulation experiments on the Internet are discussed.