Lookit (Part 1): A New Online Platform for Developmental Research

Many important questions about children’s early abilities and learning mechanisms remain unanswered not because of their inherent scientific difficulty but because of practical challenges: recruiting an adequate number of children, reaching special populations, or scheduling repeated sessions. Additionally, small participant pools create barriers to replication while differing laboratory environments make it difficult to share protocols with precision, limiting the reproducibility of developmental research. Here we introduce a new platform, “Lookit,” that addresses these constraints by allowing families to participate in behavioral studies online via webcam. We show that this platform can be used to test infants (11–18 months), toddlers (24–36 months), and preschoolers (36–60 months) and reliably code looking time, preferential looking, and verbal responses, respectively; empirical results of these studies are presented in Scott, Chu, and Schulz (2017). In contrast to most laboratory-based studies, participants were roughly representative of the American population with regards to income, race, and parental education. We discuss broad technical and methodological aspects of the platform, its strengths and limitations, recommendations for researchers interested in conducting developmental studies online, and issues that remain before online testing can fulfill its promise.