Gorilla was designed with online research in mind, but that doesn't mean the only way to use Gorilla is online! Many researchers collect data in-person in their lab space, but use Gorilla's tools to great effect.
This page gives a brief guide on how best to use Gorilla for in-lab data collection.
Online data collection comes with many benefits, such as increased speed, scale, and ease. However, there are cases when bringing participants into the lab can be useful.
Testing in your department's lab may be the most efficient way for students to participate. You might want to use Gorilla in conjunction with specific external devices that you only have access to in your lab. Or you may want to combine Gorilla tasks with interventions that can only be delivered in-person.
Using Gorilla is easy and powerful, regardless of where you use it. If you're planning to recruit participants in the lab, the benefits of Gorilla don't disappear!
Efficiency: Designing your experiment on Gorilla can save you lots of time compared to coding it from scratch. Our Samples Library can make getting started even quicker!
Research designs: With Gorilla you have access to lots of different response options and experimental designs. If you can think of the design, then you can probably build it easily with Gorilla!
Consistency: If you're also recruiting participants online, then using Gorilla both in the lab and online allows for consistency across both samples!
Want to recruit using multiple policies?
While it's not possible to set multiple recruitment policies at once within an experiment, you can change the recruitment policy at any time. So you could start recruiting using one policy, and then change to another when recruitment slows. Alternatively, you can clone your experiment and set a different recruitment policy on each experiment.
Designing your study on Gorilla allows you to create complex experiments within an easy-to-use interface. This is particularly relevant if you've already designed Tasks or Questionnaires on Gorilla. With our Experiment Builder you can easily reuse anything you've previously designed for your new experiment.
Even if you are just beginning on Gorilla, you can copy Tasks or Questionnaires from our Samples Library! If you already have a Gorilla account, use our searchable samples database to find exactly what you need.
One of the main reasons for collecting data in the lab is to record reaction time data as accurately as possible.
Modern internet browsers now support a much higher level of timing accuracy than they used to. This means browser-based data collection can be used for research that requires a high level of precision in reaction-time measurement.
We've replicated the “conflict network” effect on Gorilla, in-person as well as fully-online.
Anwyl-Irvine, A.L., Massonnié, J., Flitton, A. et al. Gorilla in our midst: An online behavioral experiment builder. Behav Res 52, 388–407 (2020). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01237-x
We researched timing accuracy across a range of online platforms, browsers and devices.
Anwyl-Irvine, A., Dalmaijer, E.S., Hodges, N. et al. Realistic precision and accuracy of online experiment platforms, web browsers, and devices. Behav Res 53, 1407–1425 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-020-01501-5
We recommend also checking out our Timing in Gorilla page for insights into how we measure reaction times in the browser. The main takeaway is, unless you're looking for very small differences, then using a browser-based platform, like Gorilla, will work well!
The short answer is, yes!
Conducting research in the lab allows you to use devices to track participants' heart rate or brain activity. Gorilla can integrate with many different pieces of equipment, so you can collect the neural or physiological data at the same time as your behavioural data!
Check out our External Devices guide for tips and examples of this type of in-lab data collection.
Gorilla provides a variety of different recruitment policies for getting participants into your study.
For in-lab research, we recommend using our Supervised Recruitment policy.
This recruitment policy allows you to define a set of Public IDs to be used with participants who will log in using a generic link. If you are in-person with the participant as they start the experiment, you can enter the Public ID for them on the device you've brought. This way, you can easily control participant IDs!
If you're looking for inspiration, check out the research below that used Gorilla in labs to great success!
Participants were recruited from the university's participant pool using Gorilla's built-in integration with Sona Systems®. By using Gorilla in the lab, the researchers were able to make use of Gorilla's precision timing for displaying stimuli while also standardising monitor size across participants and controlling participants' head position using a chin rest.
Overall, the researchers concluded negative affect can influence low-level perceptual encoding of emotional expressions. This research can be used to help inform potential mechanisms underlying affective biases in mood and anxiety disorders.
Murray, T., & Lawson, R. P. (2026). Negative affect interacts with perceptual affective biases. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 40(9), 1405-1414. https://doi.org/10.1177/02698811251409143
Undergraduates came into the lab and answered 100 general knowledge questions one at a time in a randomized order on Gorilla. If they didn't know the answer they selected one of four phenomenological categories (e.g. It's on the tip of my tongue, I definitely know it but can't produce it right now). Participants also rated their curiosity to know the answer to each question.
The researchers used Gorilla's scoring options to easily record how well participants had done in the task. They concluded that the closer we are to retrieving a piece of information, the more curious we are to know it.
Lee, A. A., Zhang, M., Coane, J. H., & Umanath, S. (2026). Using the phenomenology of retrieval failures to understand curiosity for inaccessible and unavailable knowledge. Acta Psychologica, 264, 106508. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2026.106508
The researchers replicated the emBODY application in Gorilla to allow participants to draw on a figure where they would feel comfortable being touched. Our Canvas Painting component can enable these studies!
Participants were brought into the lab to (1) more easily measure intellectual ability, (2) support a potentially vulnerable sample, and (3) ensure that participants had the same equipment for the drawing task, reducing any noise in the data.
Their results suggest that adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder generally prefer less social touch from most social network members.
Fukuoka, A., Kitada, R., Makita, K. et al. (2025). Reduced relationship-specific social touching and atypical association with emotional bonding in autistic adults. Molecular Autism, 16, 31. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-025-00666-0
