A Web-accessible tutorial for PsyScope based on classic experiments in human cognition

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.