A software system for real-time control of psychological experiments

This paper describes an all-purpose experimental system, “APES,” for use in a microprocessor-controlled behavioral pharmacology laboratory. APES is an assembly language program that can run on any of the DEC PDP-11 family processors under an RT-11 single-job operating system. Its main purpose is the real-time control of psychological experimentation. The capabilities of the system are: (1) system generation of all operant or Pavlovian conditioning paradigms, (2) collection and storage of both behavioral and physiological data in a machine-readable format for later statistical analysis, and (3) operation that can be accomplished by individuals who have no computer programming experience.