psiTurk: An open-source framework for conducting replicable behavioral experiments online

Online data collection has begun to revolutionize the behavioral sciences. However, conducting carefully controlled behavioral experiments online introduces a number of new of technical and scientific challenges. The project described in this paper, psiTurk, is an open-source platform which helps researchers develop experiment designs which can be conducted over the Internet. The tool primarily interfaces with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a popular crowd-sourcing labor market. This paper describes the basic architecture of the system and introduces new users to the overall goals. psiTurk aims to reduce the technical hurdles for researchers developing online experiments while improving the transparency and collaborative nature of the behavioral sciences.     

ePsych: Interactive demonstrations and experiments in psychology

ePsych (http://epsych.msstate.edu), a new Web site currently under active development, is intended to teach students about the discipline of psychology. The site presumes little prior knowledge about the field and so may be used in introductory classes, but it incorporates sufficient depth of coverage to be useful in more advanced classes as well. Numerous interactive and dynamic elements are incorporated into various modules, orientations, and guidebooks. These elements include Java-based experiments and demonstrations, video clips, and animated diagrams. Rapid access to all material is provided through a layer-based navigation system that allows users to visit various “Worlds of the Mind.” Active learning is encouraged, by challenging students with puzzles and problems and by providing the opportunity to “dig deeper” to learn more about the phenomena at hand.     

Projects in experimental psychology: Software for several classical perception experiments

Projects in Experimental Psychology (Sorkin, 1997) is a Windows-based series of nine classical perception experiments. It is primarily designed for laboratory use in perception and related courses. The program is generally simple to use and exploits the “point-and-click” features of Windows quite well. It complements, rather than competes with, Levy and Ransdell’s (1998) Laboratory in Cognition and Perception, which is more suitable for courses in memory. Projects can be extremely useful in laboratory courses in perception and cognition, although the number and range of studies may presently be too limited to be the exclusive source of data in these courses. Although instructors proficient with experiment generators such as MEL (Schneider, 1998) or ERTS (Beringer, 1992) may opt to design their own experiments, this is an excellent alternative for those who lack the time or the background to do so.     

ARTIST: A computer system for creating and running psychology experiments

A flexible computer system for research and teaching experiments in psychology is described. Special features of the system include (1) separate phases for the generation and running of experiments, (2) facilities to control presentation of stimuli according to any factorial design, and (3) different modes of operation depending on the prior knowledge of the users. The system is evaluated both in terms of the range of experiments that can be performed and in terms of the time and effort required to create new experiments or modify old ones. General principles for designing interactive systems are discussed in the light of experiences with this particular system.     

The limits of unification for theory appraisal: a case of economics and psychology

In this paper I examine Don Ross’s application of unificationism as a methodological criterion of theory appraisal in economics and cognitive science. Against Ross’s critique that explanations of the preference reversal phenomenon by the ‘heuristics and biases’ programme is ad hoc or ‘Ptolemaic’, I argue that the compatibility hypothesis, one of the explanations offerd by this programme, is theoretically and empirically well-motivated. A careful examination of this hypothesis suggests several strengths of a procedural approach to modelling cognitive processes underlying individual decision making, compared to a multiple-agent approach which Ross promotes. I argue that the debate between economists and psychologists are both theoretical and empirical, but cannot be resolved by appealing to the ideal of unification.     

Demonstration experiments in perception and cognitive psychology for the Macintosh computer

A package of programs demonstrating psychology experiments widely cited in perception and cognitive psychology textbooks is described. The programs are suitable for laboratory research projects and in-class demonstrations. An attractive feature of the programs is that they have provisions for changing experimental parameters to allow students to design different experiments from the original programs. Iconic memory, memory scanning (using the additive factors approach), lexical decision, target detection, speeded classification, picture recognition/picture memory, and the Phi phenomenon can be demonstrated.     

Social psychology at the crossroads: Its encounter with cognitive and ecological psychology and the interactive perspective

This article discusses the implications for social psychology of recent developments in the neighbouring fields of cognitive and ecological psychology. The authors stress the importance of studying the cognitive processes directly instead of inferring them as hypothetical constructs from aggregate responses. This paradigmatic shift implies a change in the conduct of research from the traditional nomothetic perspective to a neo-idiographic one. A method of representational contextualization is offred to generate the affective and cognitive deep structure from surface, first order data. This structure identified as the internal environment, reflects simultaneously the construction of reality by a situated individual and the recoding rules operating in such a construction.     

Requiem for analytical psychology: a reflection on Jung's (anti)catastrophic psychology

This article is an interpretation of analytical psychology in the light of the catastrophic vision and dreams that Jung had in 1913 and 1914. It is shown how the guiding spirit of Jung's psychological project is to be found in that psychic material. Then it is proposed that the completion of the symbolic catastrophe displayed in Jung's last vision (1961) points to the end of the psychological foundations upon which analytical psychology is built, and thus to its cultural obsolescence, extensive to any psychology grounded in Jung's notion of ‘soul’.     

Using PsyScope for demonstrations and student-designed experiments in cognitive psychology courses

We describe a plan for integrating an experimental control language, PsyScope, into under-graduate laboratory exercises of perceptual and cognitive experiments on Macintosh computers. PsyScope is a powerful and versatile system with which students can modify standard research paradigms and execute experiments of their own design, thus facilitating student-initiated independent research. Data are summarized with a general-purpose program, PsySquash, for import into Statview or SuperAnova for further analysis. This system provides an effective means of implementing student projects.     

Psynteract: A flexible,cross-platform,open framework for interactive experiments

We introduce a novel platform for interactive studies, that is, any form of study in which participants’ experiences depend not only on their own responses, but also on those of other participants who complete the same study in parallel, for example a prisoner’s dilemma or an ultimatum game. The software thus especially serves the rapidly growing field of strategic interaction research within psychology and behavioral economics. In contrast to all available software packages, our platform does not handle stimulus display and response collection itself. Instead, we provide a mechanism to extend existing experimental software to incorporate interactive functionality. This approach allows us to draw upon the capabilities already available, such as accuracy of temporal measurement, integration with auxiliary hardware such as eye-trackers or (neuro-)physiological apparatus, and recent advances in experimental software, for example capturing response dynamics through mouse-tracking. Through integration with OpenSesame, an open-source graphical experiment builder, studies can be assembled via a drag-and-drop interface requiring little or no further programming skills. In addition, by using the same communication mechanism across software packages, we also enable interoperability between systems. Our source code, which provides support for all major operating systems and several popular experimental packages, can be freely used and distributed under an open source license. The communication protocols underlying its functionality are also well documented and easily adapted to further platforms. Code and documentation are available at https://github.com/psynteract/.     

Health services and health care economics: the health psychology marketplace.

In an effort toward cost containment, the health care system in the United States has undergone radical changes in the last decade. These changes have influenced the delivery of clinical health psychology services. This article reviews several economic and marketing factors salient to the clinical health psychology marketplace. For example, these economic changes have placed greater emphasis on the need for cost-effectiveness and accountability in the health psychology field. Implications for education and training, collaboration with other health care specialties, new practice initiatives, and public relations are reviewed. Future challenges and opportunities for clinical health psychology are discussed.     

A microcomputer interface for control of real-time experiments in cognitive psychology

A microcomputer system for real-time control of experiments in cognitive psychology is described. The microcomputer serves as an interface that allows a remote timesharing computer to control the timed display of textual material on CRTs and collect response times accurate to 1 msec. It can control two CRT subject stations presenting the same or different experiments and control other devices such as slide projectors and tape recorders. It is argued that such special-purpose microcomputer interfaces provide a real-time laboratory with significantly less effort than does the more traditional laboratory minicomputer.     

The need for central resources in answering questions in different domains: Folk psychology,biology, and economics

This study examined whether, when lay people reason about everyday domains, they do so in a slow, serial, deliberate process or using an automatic, effortless, associative process, and whether there are differences in this respect between content domains. The cognitive resources used by lay persons in reasoning about everyday domains were investigated using a dual task methodology. Fifty-eight adult participants answered computer-administered questions on folk biology (ToB), folk economics (ToE), and folk psychology, where the latter included questions requiring participants to infer an emotion from a verbally presented situation (ToP) and false-belief tasks (ToM). Each domain was tested with questionnaires at two levels of difficulty. Half the participants concurrently performed the 2-back task. Cognitive load reduced accuracy on the main task for ToM tasks (especially for second-order false-belief items) but not for the other domains. Performing the main tasks reduces accuracy and increases latencies on the secondary task for all domains. These findings suggest that the appropriate generalisation does not relate to content domains (such as folk psychology vs. folk biology), but rather to the nature of the task under consideration. For ToE, ToB, and ToP, the relevant inference questions appear to be processed mainly by the associative systems in LTM, and the process is not affected by a concurrent secondary task. For ToM, the response generation processing occurs in the analytic subsystem, and is therefore affected by cognitive load. Further, the more difficult set of questions impaired the secondary task more than the simpler set, in every domain and in terms of both accuracy and latency. This suggests that the processing involved in the associative system consumes domain-general resources too.     

TACIT: An open-source text analysis,crawling, and interpretation tool

As human activity and interaction increasingly take place online, the digital residues of these activities provide a valuable window into a range of psychological and social processes. A great deal of progress has been made toward utilizing these opportunities; however, the complexity of managing and analyzing the quantities of data currently available has limited both the types of analysis used and the number of researchers able to make use of these data. Although fields such as computer science have developed a range of techniques and methods for handling these difficulties, making use of those tools has often required specialized knowledge and programming experience. The Text Analysis, Crawling, and Interpretation Tool (TACIT) is designed to bridge this gap by providing an intuitive tool and interface for making use of state-of-the-art methods in text analysis and large-scale data management. Furthermore, TACIT is implemented as an open, extensible, plugin-driven architecture, which will allow other researchers to extend and expand these capabilities as new methods become available.     

ConceptBuilder: An open-source software tool for measuring,depicting, and quantifying causal models

Measurements of people’s causal and explanatory models are frequently key dependent variables in investigations of concepts and categories, lay theories, and health behaviors. A variety of challenges are inherent in the pen-and-paper and narrative methods commonly used to measure such causal models. We have attempted to alleviate these difficulties by developing a software tool, ConceptBuilder, for automating the process and ensuring accurate coding and quantification of the data. In this article, we present ConceptBuilder, a multiple-use tool for data gathering, data entry, and diagram display. We describe the program’s controls, report the results of a usability test of the program, and discuss some technical aspects of the program. We also describe ConceptAnalysis, a companion program for generating data matrices and analyses, and ConceptViewer, a program for viewing the data exactly as drawn.