Abstract
PsyScope is a graphically oriented, script-based program for the control of experiments on Macintosh computers that has been made freely available to the psychology community by its developers (Cohen, MacWhinney, Flatt, & Provost, 1993) at Carnegie Mellon Univeristy. We describe a graduated tutorial that was written for new users of PsyScope (instructors or students); the text and scripts can be retrieved from a website at Hamilton College (http://cogito.hamilton.edu/tutorial/). The tutorial examples may be used as classroom demonstrations or as pedagogical aids in teaching students how to use PsyScope in their own research projects. The four examples include a Stroop test, simple and choice reaction time, and a sentence-verification task.
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We are grateful to Brian MacWhinney and Jonathan Cohen of Carnegie Mellon University for having made PsyScope available to the psychology community, to the National Science Foundation for providing funds for the facilities used in developing these materials (through an Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement grant to Hamilton College), to the Pew Program in Undergraduate Education (New York State cluster) for supporting the development of the tutorial materials, and to Sidney Perloe for his constructive additions to the tutorial materials. Among our students in cognitive psychology, Amy Grey, Kara Hrubi, Tiffany Mattson, and Christine Santoro made particularly valuable contributions, but all helped test and improve the materials. We appreciate the suggestions of Robert Proctor and two anonymous reviewers, which improved the manuscript.
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Yee, P.L., Vaughan, J. A Web-accessible tutorial for PsyScope based on classic experiments in human cognition. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 31, 107–112 (1999). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03207700
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03207700