Introduction to Inquisit
A typical Inqusit experiment consists of a single script file, plus any supporting media files such as sound, video, and pictures that are to be presented in the experiment. The script defines the separate pieces of the experiment such as the stimuli, trials, blocks of trials, and pages of instructions, as well as how these pieces interact.
The Inquisit scripting language consists of two simple syntactic constructions - elements and attributes. Elements correspond to the things that make up a script, including experiment, blocks, trials, stimuli, instruction pages, the data file, etc. Each element, in turn, has a set of attributes that determine exactly how that element behaves. For example, Inquisit's text element, which defines a set a text stimuli, has attributes that specify the color, font, and screen location to present the text.
The Inquisit language was designed to be easy and approachable to nonprogrammers, especially those familiar with the basics of experimental psychology. Writing an Inquisit script is simply a matter of defining the elements of your experiment and setting their attributes to the desired values. Once you understand this basic idea, it's just a matter of familiarizing yourself with the purpose of the elements and attributes. To get started learning how to write Inquisit scripts, read through the tutorials.
Inquisit scripts are written and run from the Inquisit editor. Once you have written an experiment, you issue command from Inquisit's menu to run the experiment. Inquisit then parses the script and either runs it or reports any script errors. A script is not compiled into a separate executable file that can be run by itself. Running an Inquisit experiment thus requires both the script file and the Inquisit program.
As an experiment runs, data are written to a file. Each line of data in the file corresponds to a single trial. You may customize which data are recorded, or use Inquisit's defaults. Inquisit can be configured to record basic statistics such as mean and median response latencies. However, it is not a statistical analysis program. Inquisit data files can be imported directly into programs like SPSS and Excel for analysis.
To learn Inquisit, we suggest the following: