Welcome

 

Welcome to my site where I would like to share the tools I have developed as part of my research. I have set this up so that they can be used by others for research purposes. When looking for software that might already be available to aid my research I found it to be more difficult than I expected. There isn't as much out there as one might think and when software has been made available often you have to run the task in exactly the way it has been originally programmed when you might want a different protocol. For example there are situations where you may want to run set size 2 trials, followed by set size 3, then set size 4.... and so forth. While in another scenario you may want to randomise the order trials are presented.

Over the course of my research so far I have now developed a number of computerised cognitive tasks. And here I outline how to download and use them and what you can customise.

Citing

 

Our paper describing the WM Battery section of tasks is now published here. If you use any of these tasks in your work it owuld be great if you cited that paper as well as the paper describing the tatool platform which is available here. Thanks.

What's Available?

 

Use the navigation links to the left to see what cognitive tasks can be run using the resources made available here. If a task has customisable options it is highlighted in the relevant section on each tasks descirption page. As you read more about the tasks and the tools used to make them (java/tatool/maven) you will realise that with just a little bit of programming knowledge you will likely be able to make changes to the source code to modify the behaviour of the task to suit your specific research needs. So, if you find yourself wanting to use a task but with one aspect modified it is likely that it can be achieved relatively simply but you would need to download the source code, modify it, and compile the program yourself.

Why Java/Tatool?

 

Quite simply, because applications written in Java are easily executed on Windows and Mac (as well as Linux if the user has the necessary Java runtime elements installed). As long as the machine you want to host the application (your lab computer, or participants own laptop etc.) has an up to date Java runtime installed then it should be compatible. You may have heard of security concerns when it comes to Java, this tends to apply to java code that is executed by your browser when accessing Java based web apps.

Tatool is a set of Java libraries that taken together provide a framework for creating psychological computerised tasks using the Java programming language. It is developed by Claudia von Bastian, André Locher, and Michael Ruflin. I have used the framework provided by Tatool to develop this range of tasks. The tatool website is where you should go if you want to learn more about using the tatool libraries to develop your own tasks. Unfortunately the documentation is somewhat sparse but there is a forum where you can post questions that are often answered quickly by the developers.

I discuss tatool in more detail on this page.