{"doi":"10.1016/j.tics.2020.06.004","title":"Online Developmental Science to Foster Innovation, Access, and Impact","abstract":"We propose that developmental cognitive science should invest in an online CRADLE, a Collaboration for Reproducible and Distributed Large-Scale Experiments that crowdsources data from families participating on the internet. Here, we discuss how the field can work together to further expand and unify current prototypes for the benefit of researchers, science, and society. We propose that developmental cognitive science should invest in an online CRADLE, a Collaboration for Reproducible and Distributed Large-Scale Experiments that crowdsources data from families participating on the internet. Here, we discuss how the field can work together to further expand and unify current prototypes for the benefit of researchers, science, and society. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted society, including how we use the internet. Technology companies are recognizing advantages of permanent ‘work from home’ policies, the healthcare industry is re-evaluating its core infrastructure to support telemedicine, and schools are pushing the current limits of remote learning. Many of these developments are not new ideas, but rather overdue accelerations and extensions of existing trends. Paralleling previous moves to online research in other areas of cognitive science (e.g., adult surveys on Amazon Mechanical Turk [1.Buhrmester M.D. et al.An evaluation of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, its rapid rise, and its effective use.Perspect. Psychol. Sci. 2018; 13: 149-154Crossref PubMed Scopus (509) Google Scholar]), researchers are using the internet in multiple ways to support developmental science. Here, we argue that a unified platform for online developmental science would benefit both researchers and society. Our call for large-scale coordinated action mirrors advances in other sciences. Consider the Hubble Space Telescope: although many meaningful discoveries can be and were made with individually owned telescopes, Hubble hosts large-scale collaborative research that would otherwise be impossible. Similarly, ImageNet [2.Russakovsky O. et al.ImageNet large scale visual recognition challenge.Int. J. Computer Vision. 2015; 115: 211-252Crossref Scopus (26746) Google Scholar], which crowdsourced a massive amount of image-labeling data, transformed machine object recognition. For developmental science, we propose a unified, discipline-wide, online Collaboration for Reproducible and Distributed Large-Scale Experiments (CRADLE). This discipline-wide infrastructure would support ‘big science’ research that would otherwise be impossible, and would also be a transformative platform for many ‘small science’ studies to produce better and more reproducible data. An online CRADLE is advantageous even for studies that cannot be conducted online, such as those that rely on specialized physical spaces (e.g., visual cliff studies with infants), special recording equipment [e.g., electroencephalogram (EEG)], or interactions with physical objects (e.g., physical puzzles), in that it frees up resources for those in-person studies. Thus, it can increase the quality of all developmental science research. The internet is already used in several ways to support developmental science. The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES [3.MacWhinney B. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ2000Google Scholar]) allows the reuse of high-value data sets by thousands of researchers across many countries. The Databrary Project (Databrary.org [4.Adolph K.E. et al.Video data and documentation will improve psychological science.Psychol. Sci. Agenda. 2017; OctoberGoogle Scholar]) likewise makes video data globally accessible. Laboratories use the internet to closely coordinate their in-person data collection, leading to distributed, large-scale data collection (e.g., the ManyBabies Consortium [5.Frank M.C. et al.A collaborative approach to infant research: promoting reproducibility, best practices, and theory-building.Infancy. 2017; 22: 421-435Cro","journal":"Trends in Cognitive Sciences","year":2020,"id":52851,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":126,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9521,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":269493,"name":"Kimberly Scott","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":268121,"name":"Candice M. Mills","orcid":"0000-0002-0820-9162","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":231346,"name":"Elika Bergelson","orcid":"0000-0003-2742-4797","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":268122,"name":"Elizabeth Bonawitz","orcid":"0000-0002-7005-9345","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":268123,"name":"Elizabeth S. Spelke","orcid":"0000-0002-6925-3618","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":16796,"name":"Li Fei-Fei","orcid":"0000-0002-7481-0810","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":268124,"name":"Frank C. Keil","orcid":"0000-0003-3688-7558","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":268125,"name":"Hyowon Gweon","orcid":"0000-0001-8012-3526","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":75206,"name":"Joshua B. Tenenbaum","orcid":"0000-0002-1925-2035","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":268126,"name":"Julian Jara‐Ettinger","orcid":"0000-0002-6167-1647","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":215896,"name":"Karen E. Adolph","orcid":null,"position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":268127,"name":"Marjorie Rhodes","orcid":"0000-0002-4664-6056","position":12,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":231341,"name":"Michael C. Frank","orcid":"0000-0002-7551-4378","position":13,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":237931,"name":"Samuel A. Mehr","orcid":"0000-0002-9400-7718","position":14,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":268128,"name":"Laura Schulz","orcid":"0000-0002-2981-8039","position":15,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":268120,"name":"Mark Sheskin","orcid":"0000-0002-1277-8608","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":16,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T20:43:25.742124Z","pmid":"32624386","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}