About Psytoolkit

Overview

This is the documentation of how to set up an experiment or an online questionnaire. This online documentation is different from the more generic online lessons.
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Experiments and surveys

Programming experiments

One of the main features of PsyToolkit is that you can program cognitive psychological experiments.

Examples

Often, it is easiest to learn from examples. The following examples not only show the code, but give detailed explanations of how the code works. If you want to learn PsyToolkit, it is best to try to read through these and to try to understand it. They vary from easy to advanced.

Online surveys/questionnaires

You can do more than just experiments. You can setup online questionnaire surveys, and if you want to, you can embed experiments in these online questionnaires and then collect the data of both the questionnaire answers and experimental data offline.
Sometimes, you just want to do an online survey without any experiment. Yes, that is possible in PsyToolkit.
Creating online surveys is relative simple!

Offline vs Online experiments

Running experiments in the browser is nice, but you can run PsyToolkit on desktop computers in the lab as well (Linux required). This is more for advanced users who are willing to go an extra step, although anyone can do this.

How to analyze data

Experiments

Data are saved in simple text format and can be opened with any statistics or spreadsheet program. Read more.

Surveys

Online surveys can be downloaded as a zip file. This file contains one spreadsheet file called data.csv (in CSV format). Further, all the raw data files (in text format) are available as well, although you typically fdo not need these.

The data.csv file contains one line for each participant’s datafile. Each column of this file represents an answer.

Surveys with embedded experiments

If your survey contains experiments, the experiment datafiles will be saved as well. These files contain the information that you have stored in your experiment code with the "save" statement. These files are textfiles and can be opened with a text editor.

What you might want to have, though, is for each participant an average score in each condition (that would at least be the standard in cognitive psychology). PsyToolkit will provide this information as CSV files, with the participants ordered as in the data.csv file. You need to make sure, though, that you have set the parameters in the experiment and ran the analysis of at least one data file. This forces you to think about the data analysis. You can change the experiment’s analyze parameters any time.

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