System for Teaching Experimental Psychology

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System for Teaching Experimental Psychology (STEP) is a collaborative project designed to maximize the use of E-Prime, PsyScope, and other experiment-generating systems for teaching undergraduate classes in experimental psychology. It is a database of scripts based on classic and student-created psychological experiments, tutorials, utilities, and course frameworks. The project is directed by Brian MacWhinney at Carnegie Mellon University, and other major contributors include Ping Li of the University of Richmond, Chris Schunn of the University of Pittsburgh, and James St. James of Millikin University. Support for STEP comes from the Division of Undergraduate Education of the National Science Foundation. [1]

PsyScope is a graphical user interface (GUI) software program that allows researchers to design and run psychological experiments. It runs on Apple Macintosh computers and was originally designed for use with the Mac OS 9 platform. PsyScope was originally developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, including Jonathan Cohen, Matthew Flatt, Brian MacWhinney, and Jefferson Provost. It has been ported to Mac OS X by a group of researchers and programmers coordinated by researchers at SISSA, Italy and the Pompeu Fabra University, Spain. It is still under active development. The program and its code are freely available under the GNU GPL license. It runs under Mac OS X, from version 10.7 onward. With respect to its Mac OS 9 incarnation, PsyScope X has a much more complete control of movies and sounds, can interact with the underlying Unix environment, and allows researchers to design programs that use several external devices, such as response devices to record participants' responses, or Evoked potential and eye tracking recording devices.

Experimental psychology refers to work done by those who apply experimental methods to psychological study and the processes that underlie it. Experimental psychologists employ human participants and animal subjects to study a great many topics, including sensation & perception, memory, cognition, learning, motivation, emotion; developmental processes, social psychology, and the neural substrates of all of these.

A scripting or script language is a programming language that supports scripts — programs written for a special run-time environment that automates the execution of tasks that could alternatively be executed one-by-one by a human operator. Scripting languages are often interpreted. Primitives are usually the elementary tasks or API calls, and the language allows them to be combined into more complex programs. Environments that can be automated through scripting include software applications, web pages within a web browser, usage of the shells of operating systems (OS), embedded systems, as well as numerous games. A scripting language can be viewed as a domain-specific language for a particular environment; in the case of scripting an application, it is also known as an extension language. Scripting languages are also sometimes referred to as very high-level programming languages, as they operate at a high level of abstraction, or as control languages, particularly for job control languages on mainframes.

Students in psychology need to learn to design and analyze their own experiments. However, software that allows students to build experiments on their own has been limited in a variety of ways. E-Prime is the standard for building experiments in psychology, STEP is a Web-based resource that uses E-Prime as the delivery engine for a wide variety of instructional materials. The goal of the STEP Project is to provide instructional materials that will facilitate the use of E-Prime in various learning contexts. STEP is compiling a large set of classic experiments implemented in E-Prime and available over the Internet from http://step.psy.cmu.edu. The Web site also distributes instructional materials for building courses in experimental psychology based on E-Prime.

STEP Resources include:

The e-prime mailing list that is used to share ideas and issues regarding the use of E-Prime to build experiments.

SCRIPTS-Classic: Runnable E-Prime scripts that can be used to demonstrate classic experiments in Experimental Psychology. These are accompanied by descriptions of the original articles.

SCRIPTS-Plus: Additional E-Prime scripts for certain commonly used paradigms. These are not accompanied by descriptions of the original articles. Some of these are recent contributions.

SCRIPTS-Techniques: E-Prime scripts contributed by various users and PST designed to illustrate specific programming techniques and tasks.

SCRIPTS-Student: E-Prime scripts contributed by Brian MacWhinney's students in Cognitive Research Methods in 2002 and 2003.

MATERIALS: The E-Prime Getting Started Guide and various PowerPoint tutorials from PST, as well as additional technical documents for response boxes, etc.

UTILITIES: Utilities for working with E-Prime and PsyScope

COURSE FRAMEWORK: Complete material set for a Lab course based on E-Prime from Chris Schunn at George Mason University

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References

  1. "System for Teaching Experimental Psychology" . Retrieved 20 December 2008.