Participate in a simple experiment to make OpenSesame better *and* help vision science!
Do you want to help improve OpenSesame and help vision science? Of course you do!
About the experiment
In this experiment, we will tweak the OpenSesame interface and monitor how this affects your typing performance (anonymously, of course). This will allow us to better understand what makes a user interface good, and why.
To participate, you need to install an extension in OpenSesame. Afterwards, you can continue using OpenSesame as you normally would. The extension will not interfere with your work.
Installing the extension
These instructions are for OpenSesame 3.1 Jazzy James.
- Start OpenSesame. (If you're using Windows, you may have to start OpenSesame as administrator. You can do that by right-clicking on the OpenSesame icon in the start menu, and selecting 'Run as administrator'.)
- In OpenSesame, show the debug window (
Ctrl+D). - In the debug window, execute the following two lines (press Enter after each line):
import pip
pip.main(['install', 'opensesame-extension-actpup'])
- Restart OpenSesame.
- You now see a welcome message. To participate, simply indicate your expertise level as a Python programmer!
This video explains all the steps:
Stopping the experiment
The experiment stops when it is remotely disabled. When this will happen depends on the success of the experiment, but it will run for at least several months.
To drop out of the experiment yourself:
- Open the extension manager (Menu → Tools → Plug-in and extension manager).
- Disable the
actpupextension. - Restart OpenSesame.
Ethics and privacy
We store the number of keys that you press while working with OpenSesame.
- We don't store which keys you press, only whether they are letters, punctuation characters, etc.
- We do not log the order in which you press keys, only how often they are pressed within a certain time.
- We collect your key presses while you develop an experiment, not those of participants while they run an experiment.
From this information, we will not be able to tell what you do with OpenSesame. Your anonymity is guaranteed.
This experiment is conducted by Sebastiaan Mathôt, and has been approved by the ethics committee of the Department of Psychology of the University of Groningen.
Source code
The extension is open source, and hosted on GitHub:
