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An introduction to experiment building with OpenSesame, 2019-2020

Semester

Semester 1, 2019-2020

Type of course

Methodological and Practical Courses

Date

January 20, 2020

Location

University of Groningen, room to be announced.


Duration

1 day

Maximum number of participants

30

ECTS

0.5 EC will be appointed for participation in the complete course

Staff

Dr. Lotje van der Linden

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. Importantly, most experiments can also be run online, allowing researchers to reach a large number of participants. Therefore, this workshop will introduce students to building their own experiments by using OpenSesame. OpenSesame is a free program for easy development of behavioral experiments for (social) psychology. In the first part of the workshop, we will use OpenSesame (Mathôt, Schreij, & Theeuwes, 2012) to create a simple but complete psychological experiment (a gaze-cuing task). In the second part of the workshop, we will create a somewhat more complex psychological experiment, i.e., an implicit association task (IAT). In the final part of the workshop, we will extend the IAT by adding some additional experimental factors.

Learning goals
1) 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.
2) Familiarizing with the use of OpenSesame by building example experiments.
3) 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. See https://osdoc.cogsci.nl/3.2/download/
Students are supposed to bring their laptops to the workshop.

Literature
Mathot, S., Schreij, D., & Theeuwes, J. (2012). OpenSesame: An open-source, graphical experiment builder for the social sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 44, 1–314–324. 

Preliminary Program
10:30-10:45 Tea/coffee and welcome
10:45-12:30 Introduction to OpenSesame. Creating a gaze-cuing experiment
12:30-13:30 Lunch
13:30-14:45 Creating an implicit-association task
14:45-15:00 Coffee
15:00-16:30 Extending the implicit-association task. Students work individually, teacher walks around and answers questions.