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Inquisit 3 Feature List

Inquisit 3 is a high-performance, open-ended, ever-expanding psychological experiment generator for Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, and Vista. The following list may not capture all of Inquisit's capabilities. If you have questions about Inquisit's capabilities that are not addressed by this list, or you wish to request a feature, email . You may also contract Millisecond Software LLC to add custom features to Inquisit.

Stimulus presentation
  • Tachistoscopic presentation of textual and graphical stimuli. Syncronization with vertical retrace interval of CRT and LCD monitors. Independently verified millisecond precision stimulus presentation.
  • Presentation of video stimuli in a wide range of formats, including Window Media, QuickTime, AVI, and MPEG.
  • Presentation of sound stimuli in a wide range of formats, including WAV, Windows Media, and MP3.
  • Present Flash animations and movies.
  • Present text in any font, color, and size, with effects such as bold, italics, and underline.
  • Present circles, rectangles, and triangles in any color and size.
  • Present richly formatted instruction pages using text or HTML.
  • Present text in any character set supported by Windows, including Western European, Asian, Russian, Arabic, and Hebrew script.
  • Send and receive signals through serial and parallel ports for use with analog devices such as EEGs. Syncronize timing of port signals with other experimental events.
  • Specify the size and position of visual stimuli in pixels, points, centimeters, millimeters, and inches, or use percentages to ensure proportions are preserved across different display resolutions.
Input and responding
  • Millisecond accuracy response time measurement for mouse, touchscreen, keyboard, serial and parallel port devices, and response boxes (for example, see devices made by Cedrus and Current Designs ).
  • Present response feedback using any type of stimulus.
  • Support for response deadlines and response windows that can be adjusted according to built-in or customized performance metrics.
  • Provide rich performance feedback based on the latency and accuracy of responses. Present built-in tracking metrics to your participants, or create your own custom measures.
  • Support for voice key response measurement using a standard PC microphone and sound card.
  • Use speech recognition for measuring accuracy and latency of spoken responses. Built in support for naming tasks.
Task flow, conditional branching, user-selected stimulus sets
  • Easily create dynamic tasks that adapt based on a wide range of variables, including sophisticated performance metrics, elapsed time, trial counts, randomly selected values, and more.
  • Create stimulus sets based on user responses and performance metrics. Allow participants to select from arrays of stimuli presented on the screen. Continually add and change stimulus items throughout the course of an experiment.
  • Define custom variables and update their values at the beginning or end of trials, blocks, or the experiment.
  • Support for a wide range of experimental designs, randomization schemes, and task paradigms.
  • Design adaptive tasks with sophisticated skip, repeat, and branching algorithms based on subject performance, elapsed time, trial and stimulus counts, and more.
  • Define custom variables and update their values at the beginning or end of trials, blocks, or the experiment.
  • Powerful demonstration capabilities for presentations and lectures. Ability to selectively run individual tasks, trials, blocks, survey pages, and stimuli.
  • Random or predetermined assignment of participants to between-subject conditions.
Data recording
  • Data are saved into an text file with variable definitions that can easily be read into Excel or SPSS. Customize your data format or stick with Inquisit's smart defaults.
  • Save data files to the local computer, network share, web site, ftp site. You can even have data sent to your email address as a file attachment.
  • Select any of Inquisit's built-in variables and statistics to be recorded to the data file, or record your own custom metrics.
  • Assign numeric or non-numeric identication codes to participants.
  • Track web respondents by IP or MAC Address.
  • Password encrypt your data files to protect sensitive information.
Productivity features
  • Inquisit is based on an easy to use declarative scripting language similar to HTML. Simply define the properties of your stimuli, trials, blocks of trials, and experimental sessions, and Inquisit handles all program flow.
  • Inquisit's script editor includes an autocomplete feature, making it easier than ever to find and use Inquisit commands.
  • Help system, tutorials, and samples. Get quick contextual help on Inquisit's scripting language by pressing the F1 key in the text editor.
  • Inquisit 3 is backward compatible with previous versions so you can run all of your old scripts without any hassle.
  • Visual designers for selecting font styles and colors.
Surveys and Questionnaires
  • Display multiple questions per page.
  • Allow users to navigate back and forward across pages, or enforce forward only navigation.
  • Choose from an array of user interface options for multiple choice questions with mutually inclusive or exclusive options, as well as an "other" option with free text entry,
  • Text entry with rich validation rules covering almost any input format. Use built-in validation rules for common data such as dates, phone numbers, zip codes, email addresses, or build custom validation rules using regular expressions.
  • Gather ratings along continuous scales (aka Visual Analogue Scales) in which responses are made by moving a slider back and forth or up and down along a continuum.
  • Conditionally add or skip pages based on prior responses, elapsed time, random selection, and a wide variety of other variables.
  • Incorporate sequences of stimuli into a survey, including including text, pictures, video, sound, and port signals.
  • Run surveys standalone or seamlessly integrated with performance measures.
  • Record your data in ready-to-analyze tab delimited format, with each respondent saved to a separate line, or record survey data using the same file and format as that of performance trials. 
  • Customize the style and layout of survey screens and particular questions.
Other featuers
  • Administer millisecond precision experiments on the local desktop or over the web.
  • Run experiments in windowed mode or fullscreen.
  • Create batches of experiment scripts to be run in sequence.
  • Launch experiments from the command prompt or with batch scripts.
  • Define commonly used elements (e.g., stimuli, trials, instruction pages) into shareable script files that can be imported by other scripts.
Millisecond at Psychonomic Society Conference in Chicago
November 12, 2008
In about 5 hours, I'll be on a plane to Chicago for the Psychonomic Society's annual meeting, where Millisecond will... more
Inquisit 3.0.3.1 is now available
October 31, 2008
Millisecond is pleased to announce another update to Inquisit 3. This update contains both new feature and a bug... more
Inquisit 3.0.3.0 is now available
July 25, 2008
Millisecond has released yet another update to Inquisit 3. This update has been cooking on the new beta burner... more