Introducing Inquisit 7

Inquisit is a platform for designing and administering psychological tests and experiments. Inquisit can run locally on a Windows PC or Mac or online on computers and mobile devices. Inquisit supports a wide range of psychological measures, including reaction time tasks, psychophysiological experiments, attitude measures, surveys, games, learning and memory tasks, judgement and decision making paradigms, and more.

Overview

Inquisit tests are programmed using Inquisit's powerful and intuitive scripting language. The script defines all components of the experiment such as the stimuli, questionaire items, trials, blocks of trials, instructions, as well as the logic determining the flow of events. An Inquisit script is saved as a plain text UTF-8 file with the *.iqjs file extension. The file format is unicode, so it can store and present characters from any locale, including east Asian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Cyrillic character sets.

To edit a script, simply open the script file using the Open command on the File menu. Once you've opened a script, you can edit it in the rich text editor, or validate the syntax, and run it using the corresponding commands from the Experiment menu.

The Inquisit Scripting Language

The Inquisit language was designed to be easy and approachable to nonprogrammers who are familiar with the basics of experimental psychology. The structure of the Inquisit scripting language should be familiar to anyone who has programmed html and Javascript. However, some of the cumbersome aspects of html syntax have been streamlined to make Inquisit scripts easier to read and write.

The Inquisit scripting language consists of elements and attributes, which enable you declare and configure the components that make up the task. Elements are the basic building blocks of a script. Commonly used elements include
survey
surveypage
expt (experiment)
block
trial
picture
text
video
html
data
just to name a few.

Each element, in turn, has a set of attributes that determine exactly how that element behaves. For example, Inquisit's text element, which defines a set a text stimuli, has attributes that specify the color, font, and the location of the screen to present the text.

Some elements, such as the expt, block, and trial elements, include event handler attributes that are triggered when the element is run. These handlers enable you to run Javascript to program more sophisticated paradigms in which the flow of the task changes based on the subject's performance or other conditions.

Writing an Inquisit script is simply a matter of defining the elements of your experiment and setting their attributes to the desired values. Once you understand this basic idea, it's just a matter of familiarizing yourself with the details of the elements and attributes. To get started learning how to write Inquisit scripts, read through the tutorials.

Running Scripts

Inquisit scripts are written using the Inquisit Lab application. Once you have written script, downloaded one from the Inquisit Task Library, or obtained one from some other source, you can open the script in Inquisit Lab and edit it or run it. You can also upload the script to Inquisit Web where participants can run your run experiment remotely from a link.

Recording Data

When running a test, Inquisit Lab records the results to a data file on the local computer. By default, the data file is located in a subfolder of the folder containing the script file named "data" Inquisit Web uploads test results to your Millisecond account where you can login and download the files.

For cognitive tests, Inquisit records two data files for each session. The first is a "summary" data file that contains a single line of summary scores for the session. The output of the summary data is defined using the summarydata element. This is typically all you will need for running statistical analyses. Inquisit also records a "raw" data file containing a complete record of every stimulus presented, every response, and every response time. This can be used to calculate custom performance metrics or to implement custom algorithms for excluding data points.

Inquisit data files are saved as simple text files (UTF-8) that can easily be imported directly into a database or statistics programs like SPSS and Excel.

Learning Resources

To learn Inquisit, we suggest the following:

  1. Watch our How To videos.
  2. Read through the tutorials.
  3. Read the Inquisit Programmer's Manual.
  4. Download and run scripts from the Inquisit Task Library.
  5. Make minor modifications to a scripts from the library using the language reference as your guide (tip: from the editor, press F1 and the reference topic for the currently selected element will open).
  6. Read through the How To topics.
  7. If you get stuck, go to millisecond.com and enter your question in the search box (powered by Google). If you are unable to find the information you need, you can post a question to our online forums or email support@millisecond.com.