MERIT: A No-Code Platform for Unifying High-Precision Cognitive Assessment Across Laboratory and Real-World Settings

Abstract

Cognitive tasks are moving from the laboratory onto participants' own devices. Browser runtimes make that move easy. Their stimulus timing, however, can vary by tens of milliseconds across devices. We asked how much timing error cognitive and neural measures can tolerate. We injected per-trial stimulus-timing jitter into a public EEG dataset (ERP CORE, N = 40) and re-measured three event-related potential components. Under a prespecified criterion of half the between-participant SD, the N170 tolerated jitter up to 15.8 ms, limited by peak-latency bias. The slower MMN and P3 tolerated more than 20 ms. The full jitter distribution predicted the loss. Heavy-tailed jitter cost less than Gaussian jitter of the same RMS. In simulated reaction-time data, the same tail shape determined whether platform error raised or lowered the ex-Gaussian {tau}, a candidate attentional biomarker. A single RMS timing figure therefore cannot tell whether a platform is adequate for these measures. We built the Mobile Experimental Research Investigative Toolkit (MERIT) to meet these requirements without code. Researchers design tasks in a visual builder that supports reaction-time, continuous-control, drawing, and sequential task families. A Unity engine embedded natively in the Curious iOS and Android apps runs the tasks. Measured with an optical sensor, inter-stimulus-interval SD was 0.71 to 0.96 ms on three current phones and tablets. It was 3.73 ms on a 2019 budget Android phone. Every device measured at least four times below the N170 ceiling. In the laboratory, the same task definition streams event markers to Lab Streaming Layer (LSL) for synchronized EEG and physiological recording. In the field, it runs on ecological momentary assessment schedules. Native mobile players, no-code builders, and EMA platforms each exist as separate systems. MERIT combines them, so the task characterized against brain and body recordings in the laboratory is the same task participants complete at home.