About Psytoolkit

Overview

This overview is for people who want to use PsyToolkit for setting up a cognitive psychological experiment or an online questionnaire.
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Experiments and surveys

Programming experiments

One of the main features of PsyToolkit is that you can program cognitive psychological experiments. There are the following resources:

Level Reading time Topic

Easy

5 minutes

Short introduction to the idea of experiment scripts. Click here to read

Easy

5 minutes

Understanding stimulus presentation in PsyToolkit Click here to read

Advanced

15 minutes

How to program participant feedback within experiments. Click here to read

Easy

2 minutes

Sharing or sending an experiment to somebody else. Read here.

Easy

2 minutes

How to run an online experiments and collect online data. Read here.

Easy+Advanced

Reference lookup

Complete scripting syntax, all commands explained. Click here to read

Examples of PsyToolkit experiments

Often, it is easiest to learn from examples. There are different ways to do this:

  1. Look at the code examples in the lessons section.

  2. Look at the code examples in the experiment library.

  3. If you use Linux, look at the code examples that come with the package. They are located in /usr/share/doc/psytoolkit/3.4.0/examples/ Read here how to try them out.

Online surveys/questionnaires

You can do more than just experiments in PsyToolkit. 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.
Level Reading time Topic

Easy

15 minutes

Introduction about online surveys. Click here to read

Easy+Advanced

Reference lookup

All the details of how to write the surveys. Click here to read

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. This is more for advanced users who are willing to go an extra step, although anyone can do this. You need to install Linux, and even that is much simpler than you might think.

How to analyze data

Experiments

When you run an experiment, a data file for each participant will be created.

The data file is a simple text file and can be opened with any statistics or spreadsheet program. Read more.

Surveys

When participants fill in online surveys, all their data is stored on the PsyToolkit server. This makes your life easy.

You can download the results from your online surveys at any time as a zip file. This zip file contains one spreadsheet file called data.csv (in CSV format). You can also download them in Excel format, which is easier to import into SPSS.

Further, all the raw data files (in text format) are available as well, although you typically do not need these.

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

The data_times.csv (or data_times.xlsx) file contains the time it takes a participant to press the continue button for each question (in milliseconds).

Surveys with embedded experiments

If your survey contains experiments, the experiment datafiles will be saved as well. Getting the data is relatively simple. You can get the average response times and error rates per condition for each participant in one spreadsheet file. Check the analyze section in the surveys for more information.

You can also get all the raw data files from each participant.

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