Experiment Template Request Form
(Click here to access the previous version of the tutorial)
(We did a Webinar that walks through the main parts of this tutorial [April 2, 2002 version]; You can watch a video of it here)
In this tutorial, we will learn to implement a simple experiment design using PennController for IBEX.
Click here to see the project that we want to reproduce.
While this currently serves primarily as a toy example, there’s an empirical question of theoretical interest underlying it, namely: What is the time course of interpreting the agreement morphology in English, in particular the presence or absence of an -s on a verb?
A good exercise when you start designing an experiment is to try to schematize the general flow of events.
In this case, we’re aiming for the following components:
- A welcome screen with
(i) some introductory text,
(ii) a text input box to record a participant ID, and
(iii) a button to start the experiment - A series of trials all following the same pattern:
- A screen that’s initially blank for a brief period of time
- Two pictures appearing side by side
- A Brief pause
- A sentence unfolds both visually as text and auditorily from a sound file
- Wait until one of the two pictures is selected (by either click or button press) and the audio is done playing
- End of trial
- A final screen with a confirmation link
This is what we will have at the end of this tutorial, but as a first step, we will start with something much more basic: a simple task on a single display screen showing one sentence and two pictures asking for a key press.
Next: Getting started