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 but use Gorilla's tools to great effect. This page gives a brief guide on how best to use Gorilla with in-person data collection. See the side menu for tips within specific contexts.
Did you know we replicated the “conflict network” effect on Gorilla, in Schools, a Public Engagement event, 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
Online data collection comes with many benefits, such as increased speed, scale, and ease. However, there can be cases when either bringing participants into the lab or going to the participants in their environment can be useful. In-person data collection can be more efficient. For example, if you're researching cognitive development, working with a local school for data collection can result in faster data collection than online methods.
Similarly, inviting participants to the lab, or going to a space they feel comfortable, may be best for some vulnerable populations. And finally, you may be interested in how people behave in different environments that can't be simulated online, such as behaviour within school classrooms.
Gorilla offers robust browser-based tools that work on any internet-connected device, including computers, laptops, tablets, and phones.
The core requirement to use Gorilla is an internet connection. Neither participants or researchers need to download any software.
Here’s how we support research:
Gorilla provides a variety of different recruitment policies for getting participants into your study!
For in person 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!
This page outlines how you can use Gorilla for in-person, lab-based studies. While Gorilla was designed with online research in mind, using our tools for in-person studies can unlock a lot of potential!
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!
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.
If you're looking for inspiration, check out the research below that used Gorilla in labs to great success!
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
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
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
This page outlines how best to use Gorilla in schools. With careful planning and the right technology, researchers can ensure successful, efficient, and high-quality studies.
Collecting data from students can help researchers understand educational development, language acquisition, mathematical reasoning, and many more areas. Conducting such studies in schools with Gorilla offers several advantages:
To ensure smooth data collection, researchers should follow these steps:
Ask the School:
If schools don’t respond or are unsure, consider investigating 4G and 5G availability in the school’s postcode. Many mobile network companies provide this data on their websites.
Alternatively, satellite internet can be useful for locations where mobile networks are unavailable. Satellite connectivity can provide speeds adequate for Gorilla tasks.
All technologies may encounter unforeseen issues, so researchers should not assume 100% reliability from any solution, including (especially) bespoke setups that won’t have been as thoroughly tested as out-of-the-box solutions.
If possible, try to bring back-up devices like spare tablets or audio-recorders, just in case!
Gorilla provides comprehensive support to assist researchers during setup and testing.
Check out our guide to responsive layouts for tips on how to get your study running smoothly on tablets, phones, or whatever devices you're planning to use.
If you have any questions, contact our support team!
If you're looking for inspiration, check out the research below that used Gorilla in schools to great success!
Utilising Gorilla in a school allowed these researchers to collect a large sample size over several sessions. Participants heard various sound conditions, and while these didn't have a significant effect on reading comprehension, nor did it influence calculation accuracy, response times in calculation tasks improved in the presence of playground noise and were longer under mechanical ventilation noise.
Features such as order counterbalancing and randomisation were implemented all on Gorilla.
Pellegatti, M., Visentin, C., Torresin, S., Babich, F., & Prodi, N. (2026). The effect of ventilation-related sound stimuli on 11–14 years students’ cognition and soundscape assessments. Applied Acoustics, 245, 111206. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2025.111206
Recruiting participants via UK schools allowed these researchers to collect the sample sized they needed to investigate novel adjective learning. The researchers concluded novel adjectives read in more emotional (positive or negative) contexts were recognized more accurately than those read in neutral narratives.
Children did the study on the researcher's laptop with the researcher in the room, ensuring a standard experience across participants and allowing the researcher to support the children as they took part. All parts of the task were designed on Gorilla.
Dong, Y., Mak, M., Hepach, R., & Nation, K. (2025). How do children learn new words via reading emotional narratives? In D. Barner, N. Bramley, A. Ruggeri, & C. M. Walker (Eds.), Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5z74x0m0
You can find this experiment directly on Gorilla's Open Materials!
This study investigated how noise within a classroom impacts children's performance and found no group-level significant impact of verbal noise and mixed noise on academic tasks. The researchers mentioned that collecting data in a naturalistic environment (a classroom versus a lab) may have helped the participants to cope with distracting stimuli like noise.
Massonnié, J., Mareschal, D. and Kirkham, N.Z. (2022). Individual differences in dealing with classroom noise disturbances. Mind, Brain, and Education, 16 (3), 252-262. https://doi.org/10.1111/mbe.12322
