Syllabus and materials for the UniBas Autumn 2022 semester on programming experiments in Inquisit.
In each class we will work on WPAs (Weekly Programming Assignments):
| Week | Date | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 19 September | Experimental Design |
| 2 | 26 September | Introduction to Inquisit |
| 3 | 3 October | Inquisit basics |
| 4 | 10 October | Events in a trial (feedback) |
| 5 | 17 October | vents in a trial (feedback) |
| 6 | 24 October | Events in a trial (conditional updating and branching) |
| 7 | 31 October | Within-subjects manipulation |
| 8 | 7 November | Within-subjects conditional branching |
| 9 | 14 November | Across-subject manipulation |
| 10 | 21 November | Work on final assignment |
| 11 | 28 November | Work on final assignment |
| 12 | 5 December | No class |
| 13 | 12 December | Work on final assignment |
| 14 | 19 December | Presentations |
| Link | Description |
|---|---|
| Inquisit 5 documentation | Documentation of Inquisit 5. |
| Millisecond test Library | Library of common Experiments programmed in Inquisit. |
| Inquisit Forums | Forums where people ask questions about programming in Inquisit. |
| Ron Dotsch Tutorial | A good tutorial on programming a simple experiment. |
Inquisit is a proprietary software for the presentation of psychological experiments, both online (on platforms such as Amazon Turk or Prolific) as well as in the lab. It is designed to be relatively easy to learn (meaning that no specific prior programming knowledge is required) and it delivers precise response or reaction times measurements.
The goal of this course is to introduce you to Inquisit so that you can apply it to your current and future research. Because Inquisit is a proprietary software, you will not be able to use it on your laptop. You will however be able to use it on the computers in the computer room, so all the practical work is done in class.
During each class, you will work on a series of programming tasks, or Weekly Programming Assignment (WPA). You can do it alone, but I encourage you to discuss and/or work with the people around you. It is however very important that each student’s work is his/her own. Do not turn in any assignments that you did not contribute to or do not fully understand.
By the end of the lesson, you should email your WPA to me to receive credit. While I will keep track of how often you submit your WPAs, I will not grade them. You should however try to reply to each of the questions in the assignments. When you are not able to, I will be there to answer any doubt or question about the code. These assignments are meant as a learning-by-doing exercise.
In the last part of the course, the final group assignment will consist in programming an experiment from scratch and to present it to the class.
This is a pass / fail course. To pass the course, you should turn in your WPAs, miss not more than 2 classes, and contribute to the final group assignment and presentation.
In this course, it is possible to gain 2 extra credits, by completing a graded assignment. This assignment will consist in programming an experiment from scratch on your own. You should accompany the experiment code with a 1 page explanation of the task and how you addressed the assignment requirements. The requirements are to choose an experiment from a peer-reviewed article in a psychology journal, which includes both within- and across-subjects manipulations and repeated measures. Before starting programming such experiment, you should send me a proposal in which you explain to me which experiment you chose and providing a short explanation of the experiment. The deadline for the proposal is the 31st of October. The deadline for the first version of the thesis (written part + code) is the 5th of December. I will then review it and give you the chance to improve it. The final deadline is the 18th of December.
Link for the course evaluation: (to be updated).