Online recruitment and testing of infants with Mechanical Turk

- Amazon Mechanical Turk can be used to recruit infants and measure their behavior.
- Looking time paradigms can be employed online using a webcam.
- Faces, singing-and-rhyming, and camera zooms increase infant attention to movies.

Testing infants in the laboratory is expensive in time and money; consequently, many studies are underpowered, reducing their reproducibility. We investigated whether the online platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), could be used as a resource to more easily recruit and measure the behavior of infant populations. Using a looking time paradigm, with users' webcams we recorded how long infants aged 5 to 8 months attended while viewing children's television programs. We found that infants (N = 57) were more reliably engaged by some movies than by others and that the most engaging movies could maintain attention for approximately 70% of a 10- to 13-min period. We then identified the cinematic features within the movies. Faces, singing-and-rhyming, and camera zooms were found to increase infant attention. Together, we established that MTurk can be used as a rapid tool for effectively recruiting and testing infants.