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Connect Project With Prolific

Once you have your closed-loop workflow set up, it is fairly easy to connect it to Prolific, a recruiting platform for web-based experiments. By connecting your project with Prolific via the firebase-prolific-runner, you can automatically recruit participants for your study and collect data from them.

system_overview

!!! hint: The firebase-prolific-runner will automatically set up a study on Prolific and recruit participants. It is highly recommended to test the experiment before recruiting participants, to have approval from an ethics committee, and to adhere to the ethical guidelines.

Prerequisites

  • You have a Prolific account.
  • Your behavioral study is approved by an ethics committee or institutional review board (IRB).
  • You have a corresponding consent form for your study.

Before you can connect your project with Prolific, you will likely need to add a consent form to your experiment. The consent form should be displayed to participants before they start the experiment.

This will require you to modify the jsPsych code of your experiment which can be found in testing_zone/src/design.main.js.

Update AutoRA Workflow to Use Prolific

  • Navigate to the autora_workflow.py file in the researcher_hub folder

  • All we need to do is to change the experiment runner. Replace RUNNER_TYPE = 'firebase' in the beginning of the autora_workflow.py file with

RUNNER_TYPE = 'prolific'
  • Next, you need to fill in the relevant data from Prolific and Firebase in the respective part ofh the autora_workflow.py file.
# time between checks
sleep_time = 30

# Study name: This will be the name that will appear on prolific, participants that have participated in a study with the same name will be
# excluded automatically
study_name = 'my autora experiment'

# Study description: This will appear as study description on prolific
study_description= 'Two bandit experiment'

# Study Url: The url of your study (you can find this in the Firebase Console)
study_url = 'www.my-autora-experiment.com'

# Study completion time (minutes): The estimated time a participant will take to finish your study. We use the compensation suggested by Prolific to calculate how much a participant will earn based on the completion time.
study_completion_time = 5

# Prolific Token: You can generate a token on your Prolific account
prolific_token = 'my prolific token'

# Completion code: The code a participant gets to prove they participated. If you are using the standard set up (with cookiecutter), please make sure this is the same code that you have provided in the .env file of the testing zone.
completion_code = 'my completion code'

Update .env in testing_zone (Optional)

The firebase_prolific_runner optimally allocates slots for the experiments you submit to Prolific. If you are done with testing, and are ready for data collection you may want to update the .env file in the testing_zone folder.

  • Navigate to the testing_zone folder.
  • Open the .env file.
  • Set the REACT_APP_useProlificId variable to True. 
    REACT_APP_useProlificId="True"

Summary

  • This is it! Running the autora_workflow.py in the researcher_hub should now result in closed-loop reinforcement learning study that recruits human participants from Prolific to participate in your web-based experiment hosted on Firebase.

Next: Customize your experiment.