There are two major software packages used by the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences for running experiments with human participants, with different but overlapping uses. Qualtrics is an online survey creator, while PsychoPy is a program for designing stimulus-response reaction-time experiments.

Timothy Collett runs an hour-long workshop each fall semester around the IRB submission deadline on both of these, and may do so in the spring if there is enough interest. If it is still early in the semester and you wish to sign up for these workshops, you can do so on this Google Form (it will be unavailable if the deadline for the semester has passed). Please also read the materials and information about the workshops, as it has some instructions for preparing for attending.

If you are interested in learning about these software packages, but it is past the IRB submission deadline for the semester, please contact Timothy Collett to schedule a meeting where he can go over the basics with you, as well as determining your specific requirements.

Qualtrics

Qualtrics is an online survey creator used by commercial, political, and research organizations worldwide. For creating standard surveys, it is extremely user-friendly and full-featured. It can also be used for some stimulus-response experiments, if there is a need to gather participants from outside of Colgate, but its functionality for this is somewhat more limited.

PsychoPy

PsychoPy is an open-source software package for designing and running experiments within the broad category of stimulus-response. It is very powerful and highly customizable, but somewhat less user-friendly than Qualtrics.