Software pebl

Are there any age norms to apply to the data? Thank you. How can I get more information on how to do it? Guillermo Escobar April 16, - pm Hi. Guillermo Escobar am , I live in Colombia. I am studying master's degree in neuropsychology and education. I need to use PEBL , for my research on working memory.

I already made the donation. Please send the password PEBL. Do You mind let me know when can I get the password? Kind regard mariana. Shaunagh Hendry September 2, - am Hi there, I made a donation a week or so ago and I'm just waiting for a password. Shane Mueller Researcher September 2, - am Shaunagh, Please check your inbox and maybe your spam--I believe I sent something a week ago and I have resent now.

If I have incorrect contact information, contact me directly and I'll get you the information Shane Mueller. I utilize it as a research measure as part of an adult ADHD assessment battery.

I also have a very small data set from the Clock Test that I'd be willing to contribute, stratified by age, gender, race, education level, and eventual diagnosis post-assessment. Shane Mueller Researcher September 28, - pm William, I know of no norm on our clock test--although I do know of a couple of small-scale studies people have done that help establish validity.

We are in the process of putting together an open data archive that will enable data contributions just like yours--this will probably be active by the end of the semester.

If you'd like to contribute the data as a sample data set, please contact me at shanem at mtu. If so, the current text layout engine we use doesn't support that, and the default font probably won't either. The font is not a big issue to change, but the RTL issue is. Sometimes if you give it the text backward line-by-line, the layout will be acceptable. However, users will typically just make a image screenshot of instructions and main text and replace any text layout within the script for anything moderately complicated.

Contact me at shanem mtu. Shane Mueller Researcher April 5, - am You should have now received the password via email. Grace Monteiro May 20, - am Would like to contribute with translation to portuguese. Tharaka Thanthriarachchi June 27, - pm Can you provide a list of psychological tools available with this software?

Is it Linux supportive? Giovanna Medina November 13, - pm Hello, I made a donation and I would like to know how long it will take to get the password. Thank you very much, Giovnna. Andrea Bosco November 25, - am I was very happy to make a donation 8 days ago for this amazing project. Now, I am awaiting for the pw. Do you have any news about it? Does the software work with Windows 8.

Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Specifically, the PeBL development team is using a DevSecOps approach for software development, testing, and security assurance. Thus, three basic trial types exist: congruent trials, in which the irrelevant color of the stimulus matches the response cue; neutral, in which the stimulus is black and white, and incongruent, in which the irrelevant color mismatches the response cue.

Dependent measures of interest are the speed and accuracy with which participants are able to make the decision. These trial types, for both circle and square stimuli, are shown in Figure 1. The six trial types in the BST for which the participant must sort the shape, but not the color, of the stimulus.

Rows show congruent, neutral and incongruent trials; columns show circle versus square stimuli. This typically requires administrator access. That is, for Version 0. Those using PEBL 0. To do so, the compressed archive must be downloaded from one of the locations indicated in the Availability section of this paper. The launcher allows PEBL tests to be browsed, selected, and run, and allows a number of functions for managing experiments e.

A series of directories are displayed on the left panel, each one of which can be opened by clicking twice on the name. The BST. Details regarding the data format are found in the next section. Next bottom panel , the BST. Other experimental parameters, such as participant code, screen resolution, etc. The software was implemented in the Psychology Experiment Building Language [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ].

PEBL is a cross-platform open source programming language designed to implement both simple and complex psychological tests. PEBL is programmed with a text-based syntax that is both structured and forgiving, enabling novice programmers to edit tests and create new tests.

The basic logic of the BST is as follows:. Basic instructions. Written instructions appear on the screen at the beginning of the test. When being taken by children, the instructions should be read by the experimenter. In the instructions, the test is referred to as a game. Shape Game five blocks. In this part of the task, two response shapes appear below the center of the screen: a red circle on the lower left and a blue square on the lower right.

On each trial, a red or blue target circle or square appears in the center of the screen, approximately twice as large as the response shapes. The participant must choose the response shape that matches the target in shape, but ignore the color. There are a total of five blocks of these trials, each of which is described in greater detail below.

Completion screen. When the study is completed, a screen is shown that thanks the research participant. Text can be added here that debriefs participants about the hypotheses, goals, and outcomes of the study. Administering the complete test takes under five minutes, including instructions and any debriefing.

If more time is available and more statistical power is needed, longer trial blocks can be used. Each block contains 20 trials by default specified by the numtrials variable.

Blocks include, in the order in which they are run:. A block of six practice trials are given at the start of the task, with one example of each type of stimuli. On practice trials, audio feedback is given for correct a pleasant beep or incorrect a buzzer responses.

The neutral block consists of black outlines of circles and squares with no fill color to present distraction from the task of matching the shape.

The congruent block consists only of stimuli that match a single target in both shape and color. That is, only red circles and blue squares are used. A third aspect of timing precision that is important for researchers is the display timing. Typical video monitors operate at a constant refresh rate that it as least 60 hz and some can be twice as fast , meaning that the precision with which an experimenter can control the presence of an image on the screen can be as long as in 16 ms units although possibly as low as 8 ms.

Special devices, even some dating back to Helmholtz's Laboratory, allow more precision see Cattell, , who described a device capable of 0. On a digital computer, images get displayed when a memory buffer associated with video display is updated by a computer program.

Then, the screen location corresponding to that memory location gets redrawn on the next display cycle. Under typical conditions, this update happens asynchronous to the program's timing cycle, and so there can be uncertainty on average, half an update cycle about when a stimulus actually appears on the screen, when it is removed, and how long it remains on-screen.

In this mode, a Draw command issued by PEBL will draw pending graphical changes to the memory buffer and return immediately, regardless of the timing of the screen update cycle, and the effect will appear on screen on the next video update cycle. By default, PEBL running on Windows uses this mode, as we have found it to be most robust to different hardware and driver combinations of our users. However, when the directx video driver is used by specifying '--driver directx' as a command-line option and PEBL is run in full-screen mode, PEBL uses a double-buffered display.

In a double-buffered display scheme, all imagery first gets written to the 'back' buffer rather than directly to the screen's buffer, and at the end of each drawing cycle the current video buffer gets swapped with the back buffer. This enables the entire screen contents to be updated on each step, preventing 'tearing' errors in which only part of the screen memory has been update when the screen is redrawn.

This allows one to synchronize the program to the video swap, as long as several Draw commands are issued consecutively. It also allows for more consistent control over the onset, offset, and duration of stimuli, which can be displayed for a specific number of Draw cycles. To examine the precision with which one can control Draw cycles, we developed another script that randomly sampled values between 1 and 16 inclusively, and then issued exactly that many Draw commands immediately preceded by three Draw commands.

The results of GetTime were recorded immediately before and immediately after the target commands, for comparison to the programmed display times. For each programmed cycle count, we compared the observed duration of the stimulus to the smallest one observed, and computed the number of ms each stimulus was over the minimum. In this test, none of the trials 'missed' a draw update and ended up drawing an extra display cycle which would be at least 16 ms longer. In general, experimenters can use this method to have control over stimulus duration, and they can also measure the stimulus duration to determine whether any particular trials failed to draw the precise expected duration.

Several caveats must be understood about drawing precision with PEBL. First, Version 2. PEBL Version 0. Second, synchronization has only been well-tested using the directx driver on windows. Other platforms may not support display synchronization in the same way. Finally, it can be difficult to assess, without special instrumentation hardware, the exact timeline of a particular draw cycle.

Consequently, the exact time at which the stimulus appears on the screen may be systematically offset from the time at which the Draw function returns, allowing the current time to be recorded.. Thus, applications requiring exact stimulus-locked registration of response time e. A number of other legal and ethical issues are involved with developing and distributing open source psychological tests.

Importantly, tests are intellectual property that are at times protected by copyright, patent, and trademark law see Mueller, As discussed in great detail by Feldman and Newman , copyright has been used extensively by test publishers to prevent the free use of tests in medical settings, sometimes overstepping the actual materials that are protected by copyright.

Typically, only the specific implementation or expression of a test is covered by and protected under copyright law. This can include the specific language, instructions, imagery, sounds, source code, and binary code of a computerized or paper test. Although some of these may be usable under fair use doctrine, in general, imagery and like material with copyrights owned by others cannot be used and redistributed without permission and sometimes payments to the original rights holder.

Thus, truly open tests must develop and distribute completely new stimuli, and all of the tests in the PEBL Test Battery do so. The danger of freeware tests is that the community will invest resources in such a test, enhancing its value through replication and validation, enabling the original rights holder to capitalize on this enhanced value by charging rent.

The other side of this coin is that many researchers develop tests using images, text, or sounds that are copyrighted by others perhaps found via internet searches , and so their freeware tests may actually violate copyright law.

It might be considered fair use to conduct laboratory studies using such stimuli, but researchers might possibly commit copyright infringement when those tests are shared with or licensed to others, or example stimuli are used in publications. Thus, we have been careful to avoid adding tests to the PEBL test battery that have unsourced imagery or test questions. Copyright is only one kind of intellectual property law that can encumber neurobehavioral tests. The concepts, workings and mechanics of a test cannot typically be protected by copyright, but these aspects of intellectual property may be protected by patents.

Patents have a much more limited timeframe, and are much more difficult to obtain, but when a test is protected by a patent, it typically means that any work-alike test that is produced, used, or distributed is subject to the patent. Many patent applications and granted patents cover tests of cognitive function. For example, U. Patent No. Similarly, Clark et al.

Thankfully, most practicing researchers choose not to patent their tests, and thus give up their potential exclusivity for the greater good and the ability of others to freely test, reproduce, and bolster their findings. Researchers who choose not to patent their tests often benefit more from having their test widely used, replicated, and normed by the research community, than they would have if they had filed a patent.

In addition, trade names and trademarks are important intellectual property that grant exclusive use to those engaged in commerce with a name. Users and developers of open and free tests need to be aware of these issues in order to avoid confusion.

Marks used in commerce are often unregistered, creating an area of uncertainty around the use of specific names to refer to tests. Heaton published a standardization manual for the test, revisions of which have later been published by Psychological Assessment Resources PAR , Inc, who distributes both paper and computerized versions of the test. Consequently, it is unclear whether the term 'WCST' is a trademark, and this might only be decidable in a court of law.

Distributing open source testing software also involves navigating ethical issues. Although the spirit of these are at odds with one another, they are both motivated by an appeal to ethics. We must point out that the APA statement codifies an opposition to the desire of researchers to publish their results and methods, and the desire of the scientific community to examine and test methods used to derive results. Because test descriptions are typically published in publicly-accessible journals which traditionally happened to be held only in academic libraries, the guidelines essentially rely on test security through obscurity.

We believe that the PEBL Test battery does not promote the use of assessment techniques among unqualified persons any more than does every university library, and every clinical journal available therein or through on-line indexes such as google; or the many tests available as downloadable content for commercial experimentation systems; or the numerous neuropsychological testing and assessment manuals available at many libraries and bookstores, possibly including the DSM-5 American Psychiatric Association, , and certainly less than popular mental testing websites such as lumosity.

In deference to the guidelines, many commercial psychological testing companies restrict access of different tests to credentialed clinicians. However, restricting access has its own ethical dilemmas: if the community relies solely on commercial providers to enforce restricted access to credentialed practitioners, this tends to give those commercial actors monopolies, driving up health care costs and preventing access to many possible patients, caregivers, and researchers who might benefit.

This especially includes organizations with limited funding or little support for psychological services, including schools, community health-care centers, prisons, and most health-care systems in less-developed countries.

Apparent violations of Ethical Code 9. Importantly, most, if not all, tests in the PEBL battery were first developed as research tasks, and later repurposed for clinical assessment. This includes widely-used continuous performance tests initially designed to study vigilance and sustained attention, but commonly used to assess attention deficits , the Wisconsin card sorting test inspired by paradigms used to study Rhesus monkeys in the behaviorist tradition, but now commonly used to measure executive function; cf.

Elling et al. Each of these tests has substantial non-clinical usage, and so Ethics Code 9. A detailed listing of the PEBL Test battery was included, along with a previously unavailable review of past research methods these tests were based on.

We described several tests that establish the timing precision capable with PEBL, and concluded with a discussion of the legal and ethical issues involved in open science and the open testing movement.

PEBL is a cross-platform open source system for running behavioral and neuroscience experiments. In general, open source testing faces a number of legal and ethical challenges, which we discuss. We would like to thank the many researchers around the world that have helped to improve PEBL by promoting, translating, using, and citing it, and through documenting and reporting bugs. The following experiment presents 20 O and X stimuli, instructing the participant to type they key corresponding to each one.

Mean response time is calculated and displayed at the end. The code here should be saved in a text file with a. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form.

Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. Shane T. Brian J. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. J Neurosci Methods.

Author manuscript; available in PMC Jan Mueller and Brian J. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Correspondence: Shane T. Mueller, ude. Copyright notice. The publisher's final edited version of this article is available at J Neurosci Methods.

See other articles in PMC that cite the published article. New Method We describe the PEBL test battery, a set of approximately 70 behavioral tests which can be freely used, shared, and modified.

Conclusions We conclude with a discussion of the ethical factors involved in the open source testing movement. Introduction The Psychology Experiment Building Language PEBL is a free, open-source software system that allows researchers and clinicians to design, run, and share behavioral tests. Open in a separate window. Figure 1. Figure 2. Evaluation of Timing Properties of PEBL For many neuropsychological tests, researchers are interested in the time measurement precision of the software, and this is true for many tests in the PEBL Test Battery, where precise timing is an important aspect of the psychological test.

Wait timing and clock access The Wait function takes a delay in ms as an argument, schedules a particular test to be evaluated within PEBL's event loop, which runs repeatedly until the test is satisfied.