Funding

Please secure and arrange your funding BEFORE booking the laboratory.

If you are using course credit subjects, please discuss requirements with the relevant contact in your institute to ensure access to subjects. We also may be able to reach students in our pool who study particular specializations/SBWLs in order to recruit them for course credit experiments.

Access

If you are an occasional user of the lab, we will provide you with a lab-specific swipe card for the time period of your experiment. If you become a regular user of the lab, we may be able to give you permanent access to the labs via your staff/student swipe card. 

Test

Actually go and test in the lab with the full number of computers. To book a lab for testing, please check the WULABS calendar and ask the manager to make a non-experiment reservation.

Recruiting

If you would like to recruit from the WULABS subject pool, we can handle the recruitment for you. We will need to know the session date, time, and duration, the number of participants required, and any other details. Further, we will need to know any conditions on our participants, for example "speaks German / English", "studies SBWL Marketing", "has not participated in experiment X", etc.

The invitation emails for an experiment can be customized. We will usually send invitation emails a week in advance to allow the session to fill easily. After sending the email, a session should not be canceled. We can provide you with access to the database so you can monitor enrollment, receive a PDF list of session participants, and can fill in participation data (see below).

Running the session

Please prepare well. Print instructions and all other materials beforehand and bring with you. Arrive early, as many participants show up early and may leave if they find the lab closed and empty. Start computers, hand out pens / instructions, etc.

Greet participants and record their attendance. Pay extras their turn-away fee. In most sessions we over-recruit in order to ensure the required number of participants. Participants to turn away should be determined either randomly or by first-come first-serve. You will need to pay the turn-away fee to every enrolled participant who shows up on time but cannot participate in the experiment. Participants arriving late to the session should not receive the turn-away fee (but may still be marked as a show-up in the ORSEE database). Please be strict with this: we should not reward lateness.

No food is allowed for participants, no hot drinks (bottled water is fine). Toilets are located outside in the corridor. Experimenters should be careful when eating and drinking in the lab.

Run your experiment. We recommend explicitly asking participants to turn off their mobile phones. The experiment should be conducted in a friendly but neutral atmosphere: no jokes. Written and oral instructions to participants should contain clear language that minimizes the possibility of misunderstanding.

At the end of the session, pay subjects. Make sure you end your experiment on time (including payment). Clean up. 

After the session

In case you experienced computer problems or similar which will potentially also affect other researchers, please 1) leave a note, 2) inform the lab manager, 3) inform other researchers which might be affected before the problem can be resolved.

Researchers are responsible for removing all materials brought to the lab by them and the participants. All computers should be returned to their standard state after your sessions (except when you will be the first to use the lab the following day, or if no other session or test is planned before your next session).

Please record the attendance of participants in the WULABS subjectpool database as soon as possible, at the latest on the following day. This is a condition of using the subjectpool; we will not provide (future) access if attendance is not recorded.

The lab tries to collect instructions and software used for experiments, for a number of purposes (documentation, for use in responding to complaints, and as examples for other researchers). Please upload your materials to the WULABS subjectpool database.

If you completed your experiment, please return the swipe card to the laboratory manager.