multiplayer-test-experiments

Standalone, faithful replication builds of published reference-game studies, built on jspsych-multiplayer plugins. Ported out of that repo's examples/ (which is meant for lightweight teaching demos, not study artifacts) so these can live, version, and be piloted independently.

Files

• reference-game-hawkins.html — replicates Hawkins, Frank & Goodman (2020), Cognitive Science 44, e12845. Sequential condition: single target per trial, one click, 6 blocks × 12 tangrams = 72 trials.
• reference-game-cwg.html — replicates Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs (1986), Cognition 22:1–39. Full-board condition: all 12 tangrams as an ordered target, 6 trials.
• tangrams.js — shared canonical 12-tangram stimulus set and deterministic trial schedule builders (sequentialSchedule, fullBoardSchedule), seeded from the session id so each dyad gets its own order while both partners agree on it.
• assets/tangrams/ — the 12 tangram PNGs, the exact set from hawkrobe/tangrams (Hawkins, Frank & Goodman 2020), themselves reproduced from Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs (1986).

	reference-game-hawkins.html	reference-game-cwg.html
Replicates	Hawkins, Frank & Goodman (2020)	Clark & Wilkes-Gibbs (1986)
Condition	Sequential — single target, one click	Full-board — all 12 tangrams as an ordered target
Schedule	6 blocks × 12 = 72 trials	6 trials, fresh full-board order each
Fidelity note	Near-exact, including Exp. 2's matcher-click gate (require_message_before_response: true)	Text chat substitutes for the original spoken dialogue — the one deliberate deviation, noted in-file

Both fix director/matcher for the whole game, reveal the target to the director only, and use unrestricted two-way chat — faithful to both papers and load-bearing for the reference-shortening effect both measure. Both were verified parameter-by-parameter against the papers and the original hawkrobe/tangrams experiment code, and play-tested two-tab at full schedule length.

round_timeout is not from either paper. Both builds set one (60s Hawkins, 180s C&WG) purely so a disconnected or absent partner cannot hang the trial forever — neither original was timed. Rounds it ends are logged as ended_by: "timeout" with a null assignment, so they're easy to exclude.

Running it

These currently run on adapter-multiplayer-local (no backend needed) for two-tab piloting:

1. Serve this repo over http(s) (e.g. npx http-server .).
2. Open a file in one browser tab.
3. Copy the full URL, including the ?mp_session=… query param that appears once the page loads, into a second tab so a second player joins.
4. The first tab becomes the director, the second the matcher.

For a paid Prolific run, swap adapter-multiplayer-local for adapter-multiplayer-firebase (one script-tag swap, see the header comment in each file) plus a real waiting room for pairing.

Note on package versions: the @jspsych-multiplayer/* package script tags below are pinned to 0.1.0 on jsDelivr, but those packages are not yet published to npm — publishing is gated on jspsych-multiplayer PR #35 ("Version Packages") merging. Until then, either build the packages from a local checkout of jspsych-multiplayer and swap in relative dist/ paths, or wait for the publish and confirm the pinned version still matches.