A Good Tutorial

‍The Plan

‍In this tutorial, we build a word/non-word experiment that will present instructions to the participant followed by six trials. Each trial will consist of a cue and stimulus.

‍When developing your own experiments, it is important to plan carefully and take advantage of the stimulus lists and tags features. This can save you a lot of development time, will make it easier to see the structure of your experiment and maintain it, and will make analyzing the data easier later on.

‍This is worth emphasizing: you should use stimulus lists whenever possible. This will save you time, allow you to add new items to the lists without affecting the experimental design, and provide you with more options, e.g. two-level randomization.

‍Let

‍Participant Input

‍In this experiment, the participant is expected to press the letter “y” (for yes) if it’s a word or “n” if it is not a word. Let’s start by defining these two keys as responses:

‍ [INSERT SCREENSHOT HERE]

In the sidebar, click on Input.
At the bottom click on the + icon.
SuperLab will create a response with a default name that is ready to be edited; type “Yes”.
Click on the edit field that follows “the following key” and type “y”.

‍You have created the first response.

‍Now create the second one by clicking on the + icon again, rename the new response to “No”, and set the key to “n”.

‍Experiment Structure

‍This diagram illustrates the structure of the experiment we want to build:

‍Notice how “Word Trials” and “Non-Word Trials” are represented using two stacked rectangles. This indicates that a stimulus list is used by the trial’s design, resulting in multiple presentations. More below.

‍Creating Stimulus Lists

‍We need two lists, one for the words and one for the non-words.

‍ [INSERT SCREENSHOT HERE]

In the sidebar, click on Stimulus Lists.
Click on the + icon. SuperLab will ask you to choose the type of list. The default, Text, is what we want; click on OK.
SuperLab will create a list with a default name that is ready to be edited; type “Words”.
Click on the edit field under “List Items:” and type

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‍For the list of words, we need to do one more thing: tell SuperLab what is the correct response:

‍ [INSERT SCREENSHOT HERE]

Click on the Responses tab; you will see the two “Yes” and “No” responses that we created earlier.
Click on the checkbox for “Yes”.

‍That’s it, we are done with the list of words.

‍In the Responses tab, notice the checkbox Correct response is the same for all items in the list. Unless there is something in your experimental design that prevents you from doing so, we recommend that this checkbox be always enabled. When enabled, you can add list items or edit them without having to worry about setting the correct response for each item.

‍Now let’s create the list of non-words:

Click on the List & Items tab.
Click on the + icon. When prompted for the type of list, click on OK.
SuperLab will create a list with a default name that is ready to be edited; type “Non-Words”.
Click on the edit field under “List Items:” and add the items “neibs”, “quihs”, and “chortz”.
Click on the Response tab.
Click on the checkbox for the “No” response.