Semester 1, 2021-2022
Type of courseMethodological and Practical Courses
DateJanuary 20 and January 21, 2022
LocationOnline
2 days
Maximum number of participants20
ECTS0.5 EC will be appointed for participation in the complete course
StaffDr. Eduard Ort
Content
Modern psychological science relies heavily on computerized experiments. Furthermore, being able to program one’s own experiments (with free and easy-to-understand software) provides researchers with freedom, independence, and flexibility. Therefore, this workshop will introduce students to building their own experiments by using OpenSesame (Mathot, Schreij, & Theeuwes, 2012).
OpenSesame is a free program for easy development of behavioral experiments for (social) psychology for offline and online use. In the first part of the workshop, I will give a brief summary of OpenSesame generally, before we will create a simple but complete psychological experiment (a gazecuing task). In the second part of the workshop, we will explore the possibilities to create simple, but powerful questionnaires in Opensesame. On the second day, we will create a somewhat more complex psychological experiment, i.e., an implicit association task (IAT) and, in the final part of the workshop, we will extend this IAT by adding some additional experimental factors.
Preliminary Program
Day 1
08:30-09:00 Walk-in & installation support
09:00-11:00 Introduction to OpenSesame: Creating a gaze-cuing experiment
11:00-11:15 Break
11:15-13:00 Tutorial on creating simple questionnaires
Day 2
09:00-09:45 Evaluation of homework; Q&A about first day
09:45-09:50 Break
09:50-11:15 Creating an implicit-association task
11:15-11:30 Break
11:30-13:00 Extending the implicit-association task
Learning goals
- Learning OpenSesame as a free and easy-to-use program to build experiments and to run them either in the lab, in the field, or online. This refers to all kinds of experimental designs, including experiments in the field of social, organizational and applied psychology.
- Familiarizing with the use of OpenSesame by building example experiments
- Understand how forms can be used to build questionnaires
- Knowing where and how to download the software, ask for help, and use the dedicated documentation.
Preparation
In preparation for the workshop, students are asked to download and install the latest version of OpenSesame on their computers. Please be aware, that the online character of this workshop makes it quite hard to troubleshoot any issues. Therefore, I strongly encourage participants to set up OpenSesame well before the course starts. This is particularly true for Mac users! In the days before the course, I will also be able to provide support via email. Note that there are different ways to install Opensesame. If one way does not work, you could try another one.
Download links and instructions can be found here:
https://osdoc.cogsci.nl/3.3/download/
Other than making sure the software is correctly installed, no preparations are needed. The keen participant, can already get a head start on the tutorial: https://osdoc.cogsci.nl/3.3/tutorials/beginner/
Literature
Mathôt, S., Schreij, D., & Theeuwes, J. (2012). OpenSesame: An open-source, graphical experiment builder for the social sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 44, 1–314–324.