Frequently Asked Questions

If you have a different question than what is discussed in this FAQ, please feel free to reach out the the VU Behavioral Lab team via vbl@vu.nl. They will try to respond as soon as possible to your question and make sure that it will be listed on this page as well.

Participant payment information is securely stored within the system and is only accessible to the lab administrator. To ensure timely payments, researchers are asked to:

• Update the participation status for the completed timeslots.
• Send the SONA IDs and corresponding payout amounts to the VBL team at the end of each week.

Once received, the budget holder will be contacted for approval, after which the payment is processed. If researchers fail to provide this information, the budget holders will be contacted directly using the details stored in the system, without the possibility for researchers to intervene further. This will also lead to a deactivation of the study.

We aim for 2 weeks, but during holidays or summer it might take longer.

Please add the following statement in the Acknowledgments section of your manuscript: We thank the VU Behavioral Lab (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) for participant recruitment, lab usage, and data collection support.

The VU Student Pool consists of students from various academic backgrounds who participate in behavioural and cognitive research studies. They are available throughout the entire academic year. As of October 2025, the pool includes 1200 students, and the number is steadily increasing as more students join.

Due to planning and registering, we require you to request physical lab studies at least 3 weeks / online studies at least 2 weeks before the session takes place, but preferably even earlier.

Yes. If no new time slots are added within 3 months, your study will be deactivated. This ensures that the system only displays active and available studies for participants.

Unfortunately, no external researchers are allowed to access the system. You can manage as a collaborator on their behalf.

Unfortunately, at the moment, external participants cannot sign up or receive payments through the system.

Prescreeners are standard questionnaires (e.g., demographic or personality surveys) that participants fill out once a year. These are stored outside of SONA and used to help researchers access important participant information without having to collect it repeatedly for every study. Due to VU's data privacy and storage policies, prescreening data is not stored in SONA and cannot be used to automatically filter or preselect participants for your study. While you can specify eligibility criteria (e.g., gender, age) in your SONA study description, students may overlook these and still register. As a researcher, you retain the right to reject ineligible participants or exclude their data. Please note that applying eligibility restrictions may significantly reduce your participant pool.