title: What can 1 billion trials tell us about visual search?
abstract: Mobile technology (e.g., smartphones and tablets) has provided psychologists with a wonderful opportunity: through careful design and implementation, mobile applications can be used to crowd source data collection. By garnering massive amounts of data from a wide variety of individuals, it is possible to explore psychological questions that have, to date, been out of reach. Here we discuss 2 examples of how data from the mobile game Airport Scanner (Kedlin Co., http://www.airportscannergame.com) can be used to address questions about the nature of visual search that pose intractable problems for laboratory-based research. Airport Scanner is a successful mobile game with millions of unique users and billions of individual trials, which allows for examining nuanced visual search questions. The goals of the current Observation Report were to highlight the growing opportunity that mobile technology affords psychological research and to provide an example roadmap of how to successfully collect usable data.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.
authors.forename: Stephen R
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Mitroff
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.
authors.forename: Adam T
authors.initials: AT
authors.lastname: Biggs
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.
authors.forename: Stephen H
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Adamo
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.
authors.forename: Emma Wu
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-0219-8527
authors.initials: EW
authors.lastname: Dowd
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Winkle
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.
authors.forename: Kait
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-2270-2455
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Clark
mesh_terms: D003625:Data Collection / Q000295:instrumentation*; D006801:Humans; D063731:Mobile Applications; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*