What type of things 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 an online 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 can be used free of costs (but it cannot be used for commercial purposes). Use it responsibly (legal stuff).

How long it takes to learn

Steps of learning PsyToolkit

There are different ways of using the PsyToolkit website:

  • Basic use: Just browse the website to learn about existing cognitive psychological experiments and questionnaires. For this, it is recommended to read some of the online lessons, and further use the survey library or the experiment library.

  • Running own studies: You can use PsyToolkit to design and run your own studies, and you can use the PsyToolkit webserver to collect online data. You will need to learn some PsyToolkit 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 1

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

Step 2

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).

Step 4

Go through these detailed lessons about how to setup a PsyToolkit online survey or experiment.