Josh de Leeuw, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, received a grant from the National Science Foundation, together with his collaborators from MIT, MGH IHP and Yale University, for their project entitled “POSE: Phase II: An Open-Source Ecosystem for Behavioral Experiments.” The funded project will create an open-source ecosystem for behavioral experiments centered around jsPsych, an established and highly-used tool for behavioral research that was created by Josh.

This grant was funded through NSF’s Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program, which “aims to harness the power of open-source development for the creation of new technology solutions to problems of national and societal importance.”

Online experiments are a powerful tool for cognitive and behavioral research in behavioral economics, human-computer interaction, linguistics, and all branches of psychology. The ecosystem for behavioral experiments that will be supported by this grant will allow researchers to make their methodological innovations open-source products that can be adapted by other researchers to answer new questions. The team’s goal is to make all kinds of research on human behavior faster, more transparent, more collaborative, and cheaper.

Over the longer-term, facilitating research that is built on free and open-source research will accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, multiplying the broader impacts of that work. jsPsych is already used for research that informs social and educational programs and policies, product design, therapies, training and development of artificial intelligence, and many other areas. In addition to the above, this project will also train dozens of researchers to contribute to open-source software development, building scientific workforce capacity that can be applied to a broader range of projects.