Inquisit Feature List

Inquisit is a powerful, easy-to-use psychological measurement and experimentation tool for Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, and Android. The following is a general list of Inquisit's capabilities. If you have requirements that are not specifically addressed by this list, or you wish to request a feature, email .

General features

• Support for Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, and Android.
• Administer millisecond precision measures on local computers or remotely over the web.
• Online Test Library with dozens of commonly used psychological tasks and measures available free of charge with full access to source code.

Stimulus presentation

• Tachistoscopic presentation of textual and graphical stimuli. Synchronization with vertical retrace interval of CRT and LCD monitors. Independently verified millisecond precision timing.
• Support for all common image formats, including jpg, bmp, gif, and png.
• Support for images with transparent pixels
• Presentation of video stimuli in a wide range of formats, including MP4, Window Media, QuickTime, and MPEG.
• Presentation of sound stimuli in a wide range of formats, including WAV, Windows Media, and MP3.
• Animate visual stimuli.
• 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 HTML.
• Unicode support for text presentation in any character set, including Western European, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, and more.
• Send and receive signals through serial and parallel ports for synchronization with EEG, fMRI, MEG, Eye Trackers, and more. Works on Windows and Mac!
• Specify the size and position of visual stimuli in pixels for precise control on a single display, or percentages for scaling across displays of different resolutions.
• Display a visual clock showing elapsed time on task in clock, timer, or stopwatch mode.
• Run experiments in full-screen (kiosk) mode or within a window.
• Present stimuli on multiple monitors

Input and responding

• Support for touch devices such as iPads, iPhones, and Windows Surface devices.
• Millisecond accuracy response time measurement for mouse, touch screen, keyboard, serial and parallel port devices, and response boxes (for example, see response devices made by Cedrus and Current Designs ).
• Gaze point logging and gaze-contingent task paradigms with Tobii eye trackers with the Inquisit Tobii Plugin.
• 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.
• Record, track, and report custom or built-in performance metrics.
• Support for voice key response measurement using a standard PC microphone and soundcard.
• Support for tasks involving drawing on the screen such as Trail Making Test
• Use speech recognition for measuring accuracy and latency of spoken responses.
• Record spoken response for manual or automatic analysis using speech recognition.
• Program tasks that use drag/drop.
• Support for modern gamepads on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices.

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, including reaction time measures, gaming and gambling tasks, memory tasks, working memory tasks, behavioral economics, learning tasks, and many more.
• Design adaptive tasks with sophisticated skip, repeat, and branching algorithms based on subject performance, elapsed time, trial and stimulus counts, and more.
• 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.
• Batch together multiple scripts and measures.

Web features

• Easy to use, browser-based tools for uploading scripts to the web.
• Easily and securely monitor and download data files from a password-protected account.
• Support for all the major browsers, including Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.
• Interoperate with 3rd party web products such as Mechanical Turk, Qualtrics, Unipark, and Survey Monkey.
• Support for administering a given test in multiple languages depending on the locale of the participant's operating system.
• Easily redirect participants to other web pages at the end of an experiment

Data recording

• Data are saved in a non-proprietary tab-delimited text format that can easily be imported into Excel, SPSS, or any data analysis package.
• Save data files to the local computer, network share, web sites, ftp site.
• Select any of Inquisit's built-in variables and statistics to be recorded to the data file, or compute and record your own custom metrics.
• Save raw data from each test as well as ready-to-analyze performance statistics.
• Assign numeric or non-numeric identification codes to participants.
• Password encrypt your data files to protect sensitive information.
• Record survey and questionnaire data in a simple one line per subject format.

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 rich script editor includes colorization, auto-complete, syntax validation, error reporting, help integration, and visual script navigation, making it easier than ever to find and use Inquisit commands.
• Data editor for viewing data files with a spreadsheet UI, sorting, and filtering
• Help system, tutorials, and samples. Get quick contextual help on Inquisit's scripting language by pressing the F1 key in the text editor.
• Visual designers for selecting font styles and colors.
• Inquisit is backward compatible with previous versions so you can run all of your old scripts without changing them.
• Easy methods for obtaining informed consent
• Launch experiments from the command/terminal prompt directly or from other software applications.
• Define commonly used elements (e.g., stimuli, trials, instruction pages) into shareable script files that can be imported by other scripts.

Surveys and Questionnaires

• Display multiple questions per page.
• Support for a wide range of question formats, including radio buttons, checkboxes, listboxes, sliders, and open-ended text entry.
• Allow users to navigate back and forward across pages, or enforce forward only navigation.
• 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 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.