Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Experimental paradigms are particular experiments that can be modified along a variety of dimensions to answerquestions different than the original inquiry but which have similar content or structure. For example, the original looking-timestudy is an experimental paradigm that has shaped developmental psychology. Thomas Kuhn proposed that, under normalconditions, experimentation by modification of previous paradigms is how science progresses.Web-based experiment platforms (e.g., psiturk and Wallace) are installed with collections of working experimental paradigmsthat are pre-populated with structures necessary to use the platform, but which can be modified to allow users to generate novelexperiments. Because these experiments are implemented in code, we can identify exactly how the code is modified in practice,and begin to directly measure and even test Kuhn’s hypothesis regarding the progress of normal science. I will describe possiblemethods for achieving this, ideally providing others a paradigm to modify.