[AUDITORY] last call for pupillometry beta testers

Dear AUDITORY, thanks much to all who have expressed their interest in joining the private beta of our video-based pupillometry software. We've had 45 labs sign up so far (!) from all over the world. This is just to let others know that we will continue accepting letters at musiclab+pupils@xxxxxxxxxxxxx until Monday night EDT; all are welcome and if you'd like to join, please submit one by then. All the details are copied below.

best,

Sam

Samuel Mehr

Department of Psychology

Harvard University

Be a citizen scientist at themusiclab.org!

My lab has been working on new software for automatic post-hoc pupillometry measurement that takes as input a video of a study participant and produces measures of relative changes in pupil size over the course of the video. We've already made an MTurk tool for manual annotation of pupil size, which is used for a secondary analysis in this preprint https://psyarxiv.com/xcj52 (in infants, pupils are less dilated during soothing lullabies than exciting other songs). An automatic version, where MTurk workers are replaced with a neural net, is giving promising results.
We are applying for some NSF funding to build a fully automatic version, with an eye toward making the method feasible with webcam videos of the sort that "participate-from-home" studies will produce. It should work in adult, child, and infant participants. As part of the proposal, we plan to release a private beta version of the software to a group of labs who will try out the method on their own participant videos.
I'm writing to ask if you would be interested in being a beta tester, and if so, to ask that you submit a Letter of Collaboration that we can include in our NSF application.
The only expectation of beta testers is to do a pupillometry analysis of your participant videos (in any type of experiment) using the beta software and to let us know how it went: we would just ask for some feedback on the software so that we can improve it, and possibly some summary statistics describing the results (e.g., main effect size; comparison to other measures you happened to use, like psychophysiology, or convergent validity with pupillometry measured with an eye tracker).
If you are interested in being a beta tester, please send an NSF-style Letter of Collaboration to musiclab+pupils@xxxxxxxxxxxxx. It needs to be a pdf, on lab or the PI's letterhead, and signed, with the following text as the body of the letter: "If the proposal submitted by Dr. Samuel Mehr entitled "Post-hoc pupillometry" is selected for funding by NSF, it is my intent to collaborate and/or commit resources as detailed in the Project Description or the Facilities, Equipment and Other Resources section of the proposal."
Additional details:
- there is no limit to the number of labs that can sign up to be beta testers: any lab in any country doing any kind of human subjects research (infants, children, adults all OK) can sign up
- everyone who signs up will be given free, unlimited use of the beta version of the software as soon as it is available (hopefully within one year from now)
- all you need to have are videos of participants in an experiment (or, if you don't have them yet, plan to be collecting videos in the next few months)
- the videos do *not* need to be super high quality; it's OK for them to come from webcams in online studies, for instance, or for them to come from your lab's archives in old low-resolution formats etc
- no technical expertise is required to use the software
- no fancy equipment is required. we will be making a standalone version that runs on a reasonably fast desktop computer as an ordinary graphical application that you can download and install
- we will also (probably) be making a CLI version for cluster computing, for labs who want to extract pupillometry from many hours of video
- after the beta period is over, we will do a free release of the complete version of the software, but that may be several years from now

If the proposal submitted by Dr. Samuel Mehr entitled "Post-hoc pupillometry" is selected for funding by NSF, it is my intent to collaborate and/or commit resources as detailed in the Project Description or the Facilities, Equipment and Other Resources section of the proposal.