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Implementation of stimuli with millisecond timing accuracy in online experiments

2020; Public Library of Science; Volume: 15; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1371/journal.pone.0235249

1932-6203

Zhengguo Gao, Biao Chen, Tianwen Sun, Haoqiang Chen, Kai Wang, Xuan Pei-pei, Zhen Liang,

Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies

Online experiments are growing in popularity. This study aimed to determine the timing accuracy of web technologies and investigate whether they can be used to support high temporal precision psychology experiments. A dynamic sinusoidal grating and flashes were produced by setInterval, CSS3, and requestAnimationFrame (hereafter, rAF) technologies. They were run at normal or real-time priority processing in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Internet Explorer on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Timing accuracies were compared with that of Psychtoolbox which was chosen as gold standard. It was found that rAF with real-time priority had the best timing accuracy compared to the other web technologies and had a similar timing accuracy as Psychtoolbox in traditional experiments in most cases. However, rAF exhibited poor timing accuracy on Linux. Therefore, rAF can be used as technical basis for accuracy of millisecond timing sequences in online experiments, thereby benefiting the psychology field.