Everyone is welcome to attend this technical workshop, just bring your laptop. We will learn how to use PennController to script an experiment from the early design steps to the data collection & analysis steps. We will use this tutorial as our handbook.

Online collection of experimental data is becoming more and more common, and makes it possible to collect large amounts of data in very little time, speeding up experimental research and pre-testing, e.g., for acquisition or neuroscience studies. However, experiment implementation options are largely quite limited in what they can do, or rather expensive, resulting in many researchers creating their own code for custom-solutions.

Ibex is a free, javascript-based platform allowing you to design and run experiments online in a standard browser. It was developed by Alex Drummond for common text-based, psycho-linguistic tasks, including self-paced reading and rating studies. Working with Florian Schwarz, Jeremy Zehr developed a comprehensive extension of Ibex, the PennController, which provides a versatile and user-friendly tool to implement more complex experimental task paradigms, with a wide range of dynamic and interactive features (visual stimuli, flexible, multi-stage trial structure, scripted/ timed events, playing audio files, integrating videos).