Pavlovia-PsychoPy: Can Bots read displayed text?

Online experiments
1

Hello everyone,

I have a pretty tricky question for you: I need to reimburse my participants after the experiment. To this end, I give them a personalised code at the end of the experiment. They need to write it down and fill-out an online survey with their bank info where they also put this code. I do this to assure that I can link experimental data to bank info. Otherwise, anyone could fill out the bank info and request reimbursement. My question is now: could a bot, in theory, do the experiment and automatically read the codes? I am pretty sure that bots could complete the experiment, they just have to press random keys until it is completed. I am not so sure about the codes because I cannot copy/paste the text PsychoPy/Pavlovia displays. Does PsychoPy/Pavlovia, by any chance, present text as images?

I know this is a tricky one, but I would really appreciate any input you might have. Thanks in advance!!

Kind regards,

Katrin

2

As an alternative approach, could you abort the experiment if performance fails to reach a certain threshold or require a simple sum or question in order to reveal the code?

3

Yes, that is a good idea! If I choose two random numbers and ask for their sum, a bot should fail in most of the cases, right? Because it can only choose a random key… I cannot reimburse only “good” participants because of our ethics, they need to be reimbursed regardless of their performance…