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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Click here to read 2 minute introduction about PsyToolkit’s aims
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Setting up questionnaires/surveys (survey scripting language)
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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:
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Look at the code examples in the lessons section.
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Look at the code examples in the experiment library.
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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.
Site map
| There are a whole bunch of documentation files here. Here is a complete list. |