The Psychology Experiment Building Language (PEBL) and PEBL Test Battery

Abstract

Background: We briefly describe the Psychology Experiment Building Language (PEBL), an open source software system for designing and running psychological experiments.

New method: We describe the PEBL Test Battery, a set of approximately 70 behavioral tests which can be freely used, shared, and modified. Included is a comprehensive set of past research upon which tests in the battery are based.

Results: We report the results of benchmark tests that establish the timing precision of PEBL.

Comparison with existing method: We consider alternatives to the PEBL system and battery tests.

Conclusions: We conclude with a discussion of the ethical factors involved in the open source testing movement.

Keywords: Continuous Performance Test; Executive function; Iowa Gambling Task; Mental rotation; Motor learning; Open science; Trail-making Test; Wisconsin Card Sorting Test.

Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Figures

Figure 1

Two measures of the usage and adoption of PEBL over time: the number of downloads recorded via sourceforge.net, and the number of published manuscripts (papers, conference proceedings, theses, etc.). *2013 figures are partial values through October 22, 2013.

Figure 2

Screenshot of the PEBL Launcher, which allows a user to navigate the test battery, run specific tests, and execute a 'chain' of tests appropriate for a particular study.

Figure 3

Histograms of absolute and de-centered inter-tapping times for three different tapping speeds. These results show that keyboard input timing is precise to roughly 5 ms.

Figure 4

The inter-response time from 100 consecutive responses. Times vacillate between 95 ±1, and 100±1 ms, indicating input events are processed in 5-ms epochs.