Possible to check for number of open tabs, background music apps?

Online experiments
1

Hi,
we are having some problems with data quality in our online studies. We (somewhat naively) thought that appeals to participants to give the study their full undivided attention and turn off all other sources of distraction on their computer would help (i.e., close all other tabs, close background apps such as email, music streaming).

Having seen some screenshots of participants that have completed the study suggests that the reality is quite different. I counted on one occasion 10 open apps, 15 open tabs in the browser, a music streaming app running in the background. The list goes on.

Are there ways to check for some of these things in javascript? For example, count number of open tabs as discussed here?

Or can you check in javascript whether there is already sound playing from a different source than the online experiment?

Best wishes,
Henning

2

Hi There,

I am not sure of a way to check if the participant has several tabs open, but one thing you can do is make sure the experiment is in full screen mode and then check if they exit full screen mode and alert them. Something like this? detect_fullscr [PsychoPy]

files here: Rebecca Hirst / detect_full_screen_demo · GitLab

Hope this helps,
Becca

3

Thank you Becca, this is great. Is it also possible to have pavlovia switch back to full screen if not full screen has been detected?

4

Hi Henning,

My instinct would be that PsychoJS tries to deter that so as to stop people getting “trapped” in experiments. In theory you could try win.fullscr = True but I can understand if the library is set up to block that.

Becca