Welcome to the Gorilla FAQ page! Here you will find answers to most frequently asked questions regarding Gorilla Product, Online Timing Accuracy, My Account Settings and more. Navigate through the menu to the left to find more information on each topic.
If you are looking for Gorilla Legal Documents, information about Ethics Application, GDPR Complience, Data Protection and Security etc. visit our Due Diligence page.
The Gorilla Experiment Builder is a cloud based research platform that allows researchers and students to quickly and easily create and deploy behavioural (reaction-time) experiments online.
Simply login to Gorilla using your browser to access:
Create your component questionnaires and tasks and then link them together into an overall experimental protocol.
Then deploy your experiment online and recruit your participants. You can do this via social media (i.e. Facebook) or paid services via our trusted partners (Prolific, mTurk, SONA and more) or by email.
Survey tools allow you to ask explicit questions and get subjective responses from the respondent.
In contrast, a behavioural study typically has lots of trials that capture the respondents behaviour in terms of accuracy and reaction times. From these raw metrics, secondary metrics can be derived to get an objective measure of behaviour.
Gorilla is built for running behavioural studies. The task builder is fully tooled – you don’t have to code – so you can create your study quickly and easily. You then configure the experiment protocol in the Experiment Tree tool.
This allows you to add randomisation, counterbalancing, repeats and delays to create a wide range of experiments designs.
Find out more about our tools.
We know that novel research sometimes needs completely new functionality! As well as the tooled environment Gorilla allows you to augment the functionality we provide by adding scripts (snippets of JavaScript) or build a task from scratch in the Code Editor.
We were chatting to a client, and in a moment of frustration with their current tools they said 'I just want something as easy to use as Survey Monkey, for putting reaction time tasks online. Is that too much to ask?'
To which we responded 'Oh, so you want a bigger and better monkey! Maybe a Gorilla?'
The name stuck.
(Pedants: yes, yes, Gorillas are apes, not monkeys. Five points to Griffindor!)
Build for free. Pay per participant.
This means it’s completely free to sign up to Gorilla and to use our questionnaires, task and experiment creation tools. We only charge for data collection. Our current prices are shown on our Pricing page.
This model allows universities to teach students how to create tasks and experiments—unimpeded by cost, subscription plans or number of users. Once researchers or students have built a study they’re happy with, they simply deploy it online for data to be collected.
Each student could send the link to a handful of friends, and once the data is in, the entire class can analyse the data. One study with 200 participants would cost just £170 + VAT.
We offer lab subscriptions starting at £1,350 + VAT and department subscriptions starting at £4,580 + VAT. Visit our Pricing page for more details.
Researchers can design, create and complete studies in record time—and for a fraction of the cost of traditional methods
This means that entire studies can be condensed into days, rather than weeks—and for very little cost. Productivity is uplifted, and dead ends that might have taken months to uncover are quickly resolved.
Because Gorilla is so easy to use, technical staff have fewer support queries—freeing them up to help elsewhere.
When queries do arise, resolving them is faster (and can be done from anywhere) thanks to Gorilla’s online interface.
Gorilla operates on any device with a browser. Which means students can use their own laptops for lab work. Over time, this puts less pressure on the department to provide expensive computers.
Data can be collected online, which also reduces the need for testing rooms. This frees up valuable real-estate within the department and reduces facilities costs.
For online courses, students can work from any location, which means they don’t have to come to the department to get practical lab experience. This convenient way of working frees up space and reduces facilities and staff costs.
Sample tasks available in Gorilla can be cloned for easy, time-saving adaptation. Our support pages also provide everything you need to use the software.
We also offer technical email support to paying clients. However, we encourage students to problem solve themselves, as much as possible. In this way, they learn more, while accurately reflecting their skill level.
In Gorilla, we created numerous features to give you felxibility in creating your online experiments.
See our list of Gorilla Tools and Features.
'Gorilla is designed for psychologists, so it has all the relevant options. I've found it really easy to use and very flexible.'
Hannah Betts, University College London
'Gorilla is quite simply a revolutionary product for the field of psychology. With so much of the field collecting data over the Internet, the unrivalled flexibility of Gorilla to create any behavioural task quickly and easily is invaluable. On top of that, it provides many complex tasks ready-made, as well as integration with many participant pools like SONA and Prolific.ac. In short, Gorilla really will transform your research and is a fantastic investment.'
Alex Jones, Swansea University
'Massively impressed with Gorilla. Logged on for the first time yesterday lunchtime. Had a demo experiment ready for students to adapt by 6pm the same day.'
Jenni Rodd, Senior Lecturer, UCL
'I use Gorilla in my research on typical and atypical social abilities. This combines experimental tasks and questionnaire measures, in a way that is not possible using other platforms. I found the platform intuitive, easily to learn, but also very powerful. And I have also been extremely impressed with the enthusiasm and (personalized) support from the Gorilla Team, and believe the platform has potential to be the market leader in online experimentation, both in and outside of academic settings!'
Punit Shah, Kings College London
'Gorilla is a great product providing great value to researchers conducting online experiments. The workflow is very clear and cleverly designed. It is a very efficient, flexible and powerful way of creating online experiments. The user interface is super user-friendly and there is practically no learning curve. Thanks for the great support service, too.'
Wing Lau, Xi'an Jiaotong, Liverpool University
'Gorilla lets me take my experiments online quickly and efficiently. The clear and straightforward interface allows me to map out the logic of my experimental designs, whilst its modular nature helps me to build and test components as I go. Taking my research online will dramatically increase my sample size, and help me to reach groups under-represented in my field.
Alexandra Hendry, Kings College London
Gorilla is an ideal environment for teaching Research Methods, as students can get valuable experience in operationalising experiments, collecting data, and analysing the data collected.
The Experiment Tree makes the experimental design clear, which can often help students understand whether their experiment is adequately controlled.
We have a suite of tools that allow teachers to manage classrooms. These allow you to:
If you want your students to try out a task for free (i.e. without using your tokens), you could add your students as collaborators to your project and they will be able to try it out for free using the preview. If you want to collect their data, they will need to download it when the option comes up at the end of the task/experiment, as it is not saved.
For Masters students who may not have the time or inclination to learn to code, Gorilla offers a user-friendly environment in which to author completely novel tasks.
Read our Case Studies about UCL's and Birkbeck's experiences here:
We have collated a list of publications that cite Gorilla.
We also have the following interviews from ambitious researchers that have embraced online research methods.
Have a look at a full list of our Spotlight Interviews.
Gorilla Open Materials is our contribution to Open Science on the Gorilla platform. Gorilla Open Materials is an open-access repository within Gorilla where you can publish your experiments, tasks and questionnaires. This will enable researchers across the world to:
Read more on the benefits of publishing your tasks, questionnaires and experiments to Gorilla Open Materials on our announcement page and learn how to do this through our Open Materials 'How to' Guide.
Gorilla Experiment Builder is designed to resolve many timing issues and make reliable online experimentation open and accessible to a wider range of technical abilities. We use high resolution timers for accurate reaction times and frame counting for accurate stimuli presentation times - techniques that have only recently become available in all major browsers.
In 2019, we published our paper on timing accuracy in Gorilla. In 2021, we also published a paper where we examined the timing accuracies on various online platforms, browsers, and devices. For more information, you can read our comparison of platforms, browsers and devices in online research.
See our Timing in Gorilla website for a detailed technical overview of the timing techniques employed in Gorilla and to learn more about timing in online experiments through some extra resources.
Gorilla supports a full range of characters sets in Tasks and Questionnaires including, but not limited to, Chinese, Arabic and Hebrew, so you can interact with participants around the world.
If you want to include text in a language that reads right-to-left, in a rich text or HTML zone, you can move your punctuation to the beginning of your sentences by using the unicode character ‫.
You can also add <div style="text-align:right;">your text here</div> to align your text to the right.
Task spreadsheet cells will also accept formatting.
You can also localise different areas in Gorilla by manipulating the localisation settings in multiple Task Builder zones which use English as a default. See our Localisation page for more information!
Code in Gorilla is written in TypeScript, which is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. The reason we chose TypeScript over plain JavaScript is that TypeScript offers a wealth of useful features that make writing code easier, and because many of those features are destined to become part of the ES6 standard which is currently being ratified. This means that JavaScript will effectively become TypeScript, and so your code is future-proofed.
In terms of libraries, JQuery and Bootstrap are included by default.
For more information about the Code Editor, have a look at our How To: Code Editor guide.
Below you can find the answers to some most frequently asked questions about the user's account.
Can I change my email address or password?
Yes! Go to your My Account page (in the right top corner menu of (https://app.gorilla.sc/) and then click on the Login tab.
Where can I find sign up offers I have received?
Go to My Account page, Billing tab.
How do I change my email preferences?
Go to My Account page, Mailing Lists tab.
How do I delete my account?
Go to My Account page, Login tab, select Delete My Account.
If you also want to delete your participant data, you will need to do this prior to deleting your account.
If you're unable to sign up or log in to your account, try these troubleshooting steps first which are the most common reasons that users struggle.
Make sure you're using the right email address
This is the most common problem we see when users struggle to sign up or log in. Academic IT accounts often have multiple email addresses that go to the same inbox, such as IDnumber[at]university.ac.uk or firstname.lastname[at]university.ac.uk or firstinitial.lastname[at]university.ac.uk or name[at]student.university.ac.uk - we've seen so many combinations!
If you have been invited by your institution to sign up for Gorilla, make sure the email address you sign up with matches the email address the invitation was sent to. This will ensure you can easily access your subscription once you have finished signing up!
If you already have a Gorilla account but are having trouble logging in, try all of the email addresses you have with your institution, in case you signed up to Gorilla with a different email.
Check spam/junk for email verification and password reset emails
If you are expecting an email verification or password reset message from us but have not received it, be sure to check your spam/junk folder, as these messages sometimes get filtered there.
If you have requested a verification code several times, bear in mind that only the most recent code will be valid. This is especially important as the email with the verification code might get delivered with a delay, so make sure to give it enough time before requesting a new code.
Check the link in the email verification or password reset email
Some email providers, such as Outlook, convert links to "safe" links automatically, which can cause problems when clicking them. If clicking the link in your email doesn't work, try copy and pasting the link directly into your browser instead.
Still having trouble?
Send us an email, and we'll be more than happy to help you out!
We have a seat licensing model. Each person signs up with their own email address and effectively has their own account. Each user then has complete control over any task, questionnaire, experiment and associated data that they have authored. This model fits with BPS (The British Psychological Society) requirements around data security; data is only accessible by the person that owns the experiment or those that they are collaborating with. Users can also collaborate on projects. When sharing projects the level of access (read, write, admin) can also be set.
We don't currently have the idea of student accounts and supervisors. Any account holder is able to publish their experiments and the onus is on them to ensure they have done so in compliance with their institutions ethics and code of conduct.
When your licence expires, your account will revert to a Pay-per-Participant account. All you data, task, questionnaires and experiments will be maintained. You will still have access to all the editing tools and the previewing tools. You just won't be able to collect more data without first purchasing pay-per-participant tokens.
