What you can do with PsyToolkit

  • Program a cognitive psychological experiment, such as the Simon task and run it within your browser (without any plugins)

  • Create a questionnaire survey

  • Run experiments and questionnaire surveys online, and collect data from online participants.

  • While the web based system is convenient, you can instead setup a stand-alone laboratory computer using PsyToolkit (Linux OS required). This supports common external keyboards (Blackbox, Cedrus and other dedicated hardware).

For whom is PsyToolkit

  • Psychology students

  • Researchers (psychologists, behavioral researchers)

PsyToolkit can be used around the world. It is free of costs and hosted on a web server of the University of Glasgow. Use it responsibly (legal stuff).

Steps of learning PsyToolkit

If you only want to learn about cognitive psychological phenomena or personality traits, you can just browse the lessons and library. This is particularly useful for highschool and undergraduate students. If you want to set up your own studies, you will need to learn to do some coding.

Fear not, there is a lot of documentation and there are plenty of complete examples to copy and paste from the free libraries.

All the information needed to learn PsyToolkit is online.

Learning PsyToolkit is best done by looking at examples, reading the online documentation, using the blue question marks on the website with context help, and just working with trying and making mistakes until it works (trial-and-error).

An extensive A-Z example with videos can be found here.

Step one

Make sure you understand the basics about cognitive psychological experiments. Click this link where these concepts are explained.

Step two

Experiments needs stimuli. You need a "drawing" program to create such stimuli. Here is a lesson on how to do this with Inkscape, which is a free of cost tool

Step 3

Now you are ready to setup a PsyToolkit account. All you need is an email and then setup your account via the main page (register account).