Getting Started with SuperLab

‍Let’s Run an Experiment

‍The basic units of a SuperLab experiment are blocks, trials, and trial designs. A trial requires one design. A block can consist of as many trials as you need:

‍A newly created experiment contains two blocks, two trials, and two designs to get you started. It is ready to go:

• Click on the Ready to Run button; SuperLab will show you a couple of options.
• Click on the Run button; SuperLab will open a window that covers the entire display.
• Press any key to proceed to next trial.

‍When done, SuperLab will return to the main experiment window.

‍A Tour of the Main Window

‍On the left, the main window has a sidebar for editing different aspects of the experiment. This is the view when Experiment is selected in the sidebar:

‍This view is where you connect blocks, trials, and trial designs together:

• Select a block: all the trials that have their checkboxes enabled will be part of that block.
• Select a trial, then select the trial design that applies to that trial. SuperLab shows a thumbnail preview of the design.
• You can double-click on the thumbnail to edit the trial design.

‍Now let’s build an experiment where a trial consists of a cue followed by a word.

‍Using The Trial Designer

‍In the main window:

• Click on the trial named “Trials”; it uses a design named “My Design”.
• Double-click on the thumbnail (or click on the edit icon).

‍This will open the trial designer. The three main areas are:

• “A” shows the slide thumbnails. This default design has two slides, one containing a cue and the other one is blank. Click on a thumbnail to select the slide you want to edit.
• “B” is your slide. It represents your display, scaled down, providing a real what-you-see-is-what-you-get designer.
• “C” is the inspector.

‍The inspector area’s appearance is versatile and will change depending on the selected object or your actions. To illustrate, click on the cue in the middle of the slide:

‍You will notice two things:

• The inspector now shows three tabs: Object, Arrange, and Slide.
• The black bar shows options to duplicate or delete the selected object,. There are also options to select the next object, especially useful if the object is off screen.

‍Now let’s create an experiment.

• Click on the second thumbnail to select the blank slide.
• In the black bar, click on the “add object” icon. The inspector gets replaced with a toolbox and the add object icon gets replaced with a checkmark .

‍When you hover with the mouse over the different object types in the toolbox, SuperLab will display the object type’s name. Now click on the Text icon: SuperLab will automatically present you with this dialog:

‍You can enter text such as instructions or you can create a text stimulus list on the fly:

• Click on the Use a List tab.
• Type: Giraffe, Mouse, Tiger, Elephant, and Cat.
• Click on the Next   button.
• SuperLab will ask you to provide a name for this list of words. You should always provide a relevant name. Type “Animals”.
• Click on OK.
• Click on the checkmark icon to close the toolbox.

‍You can now edit properties of the text (font, color, etc.) in the inspector and move the text around using the mouse. For more precise positioning or to randomize the position, click on the Arrange tab.

‍Let’s run it!

• Click on the Close Trial Designer button to go back to the main window.
• Click on the Ready to Run… button.
• Click on the Run button.

‍When the experiment runs, you will see a cue that stays on the screen for 500ms followed by a word. This will happen five times because the stimulus list that we created contains five words.

‍Our fun tour of SuperLab is now done.

‍Next Step

‍Make sure to spend a few minutes on A Good Tutorial. It builds a realistic experiment, showing things like how to define a correct response, randomizing, pilot mode, and seeing your data.