Inquisit 3 Help
Inquisit is a general purpose experimentation engine for designing and administering psychological experiments and measures. Inquisit can be used to collect a wide range of psychological data, including reaction time tasks, psychophysiological experiments, attitude measures, market research, and subjective questionnaires.
An Inquisit experiment is specified using Inquisit's powerful and intuitive scripting language. The script defines all of the pieces of the experiment such as the stimuli, questionaire items, trials, blocks of trials, instructions, as well as the logic determining the flow of events. An Inquisit script is saved as a plain text file with the *.exp file extension. The script file can be opened, edited, and run using the Inquisit editor.
The Inquisit scripting language consists of two simple syntactic constructions - elements and attributes. Elements correspond to the things that make up a script, including surveys, survey pages, experiments, blocks, trials, stimuli, instruction pages, the data file, and so forth. 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 who are familiar with the basics of experimental psychology. The structure of the Inquisit scripting language should be familiar to anyone who has edited HTML. However, some of the cumbersome aspects of HTML syntax have been streamlined to make Inquisit scripts easier to read and write. 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 details of the elements and attributes. To get started learning how to write Inquisit scripts, read through the tutorials.
Inquisit scripts are written and run using the Inquisit editor. Once you have written an experiment, you issue commands from Inquisit's menu to run parts of the experiment or the whole thing. When a script is run, Inquisit first parses its commands. If the script contains no errors, it runs. Otherwise, Inquisit reports the errors in the righthand panel of the editor. Note that Inquisit does not compile a script into an executable file that can be run by itself. Running a script thus requires that the Inquisit program or web control be installed on the machine
As Inquisit Desktop Edition runs an experiment, it writes the data to a file. By default, the data file is located in the same folder as the script file using the same name as the script file except that the file extension is changed to "dat". By default, Inquisit Web Edition saves data files to the Inquisit web server where you can log in and download the files.
For reaction time tasks, each line of data in the file corresponds to a single trial. For questionnaires, all responses from each participant are stored on a single line. Inquisit data files can be imported directly into programs like SPSS and Excel for analysis. Inquisit can be configured to record metrics such as mean and median response latencies, standard deviations, percentage of correct response, and even custom statistics, but for most purposes, it is necessary to analyze the data using a statistical analysis program.
To learn Inquisit, we suggest the following: