SuperLab Tutorial

Thank you for using SuperLab.

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

This experiment is designed to illustrate a few techniques and features of SuperLab:

When developing your own experiments, careful planning and taking advantage of the stimulus lists and code values features can save you a lot of development time as well as make it easier to see the structure of your experiment and maintain it.

Going through this tutorial takes less than an hour.  What you need to type is shown in this color.

Step 1: Run SuperLab

On Mac OS X:

Click on the SuperLab icon in the dock.

On Windows XP:

Click on the Start button in the bottom left corner of your monitor, then click on All Programs, then SuperLab 4.5, then SuperLab 4.5 again.  The program will run and open a window like the one shown below.

Step 2: Creating a Block and a Trial

This is the main experiment window where all trials are created:
 

 

The smallest unit of an experiment is the event, usually a stimulus or an event marker.  A trial is a set of events, and a block is a set of trials.  To run an experiment, you must have at least one block, one trial, and one event that are linked together.

Note the orange rectangle drawn around the list of blocks.  To familiarize yourself with the SuperLab workspace, try the following steps:

 

Now we will create the first trial:

You can also press the Tab key to move the orange selection rectangle.

Step 3: Saving the Experiment

We may not have created much of an experiment yet but it’s a good idea to save and save often:

Step 4: Creating an Event

Back to the experiment, you are now ready to create your first event.   We want to complete the instructions part of the experiment.

As mentioned earlier, an event is the smallest unit of an experiment.  It is where you tell SuperLab what to present to the participant, what is a correct response, and how to provide feedback based on the participant’s response.

 

Click on the OK button.  The Event Editor will go away and “Instructions” will also appear in the list of events.

Step 5: Linking

In SuperLab, various elements of an experiment are created separately and then "linked" together.  To link the block, trial, and event that you just created, follow these steps:

The block and trial are now linked.  Let's do the same for the trial and event:

Click on the Save Experiment icon.

Step 6: Selecting an Input Device

Most experiments require some sort of response from the participant.  Prior to running an experiment, we need to select the device that participants will use to respond:

Step 7: Running the Experiment

You now have enough to run an experiment.  Click on the Run Experiment icon shown on the right.  SuperLab will present the Run dialog:
 

 

Since we're still early in the development stage, there is no need to enter the participant's name or collect data:

SuperLab will open a window that covers the entire screen, display the instructions that you typed in Step 4 earlier, and wait for you to press any key on the keyboard.  You can also press the Esc key to cancel an experiment in progress.

Step 8: Defining the Participant Responses

As mentioned in the instructions, the participant is expected to respond by pressing the keys Y and N.  We need to create two corresponding responses.  Note that SuperLab will always record what the user presses regardless of whether you define responses or not, but by doing so you can later tell the Event Editor which is the correct response for a particular stimulus.  This has the following benefits:

To create the responses:

We repeat the steps above for the N key:

Remember to save; click on the Save Experiment icon.

Step 9: Adding a Cue

We are now ready to build the core of the experiment.  Recall that we want to present six trials, each consisting of a cue and a stimulus.  Let's start with the cue:

A cue is typically presented for a brief moment to direct the participant's attention to a particular location on the screen:

We're done with the cue.  Click on OK to close the Event Editor.

Step 10: Using Stimulus Lists

The next step is to create the events that present the stimuli.  This is similar to creating the instruction and cue events except that we do it six times, one for each stimulus.  Here, we introduce the all important stimulus lists feature which will allow us to create a single event instead of six:

The list is ready.  Before we proceed to using it, it's worth taking a minute to emphasize the advantages of using stimulus lists:

Click on the Save Experiment icon.

Step 11: Creating the Stimuli

You now have everything needed to create the stimuli using a single event:

That's it.  You have just taken care of presenting your stimuli with a couple of mouse clicks.  We still need to tell SuperLab what is the correct response for a given list item.

We're done with the list of words.  For nonwords:

We would like the event to stay on the screen until the participant presses the correct key:

Last but not least (as far as this event is concerned), we need to reset the reaction time timer.  This is a very important detail: not doing so means that the reaction times that SuperLab collects in the data file will be measured relative to the onset of the cue instead of the onset of the stimulus itself:

Back in the main window, notice that the Stimulus event has a stacked checkbox () instead of standard checkbox.  This is a visual indication that the event uses a stimulus list.

Remember to save; click on the Save Experiment icon.

Step 12: Creating the Trials

The "hard" part is done.  We still need to create one trial and one block, and link them together.  We start with the trial:

Step 13: Creating a New Block

It is tempting to simply link the "Word-Nonword Trial" to the existing "Instructions" block.  But this would be a bad practice and, in the case of this particular experiment, not even an option.  The reason is because we want to randomize the trials.  If everything was part of a single block, the instructions would get randomized as well and presented at the beginning only by chance.

Click on the Save Experiment icon.

Congratulations!  You have learned several concepts of SuperLab such as linking and using stimulus lists, and now have a ready-to-go experiment.  Click on the Run Experiment icon on the toolbar to run it.