A Beginner's Guide to Setting Up Your Experiment on Pavlovia

Designing an experiment

If you are a researcher in the field of psychological research, behavioral or cognitive experiments, then you must know the difficulty of running experiments, especially remote studies online. One such tool that can aid you in designing, creating and running online experiments is the www.cognition.run platform, an extensive resource dedicated to facilitating cognitive tasks and experiments online.

Step-by-Step to Setup Your Experiment on Pavlovia

Pavlovia is a powerful platform for conducting online experiments. It's built on jspsych, a JavaScript library for creating web-based Psychology Experiments. Here's how to get started:

  1. Create an account: Visit Pavlovia.org and create your free account.
  2. Design your experiment: Using jspsych functionality, you design your experiment in JavaScript. If you're new to jspsych, check out this jspsych tutorial to get you started.
  3. Add your experiment to Pavlovia: In your Pavlovia dashboard, click "New" and then "Experiment". Provide a name for your experiment and select your jspsych script.
  4. Run a Pilot Experiment: Before making your experiment public, run a pilot to identify and iron out any potential difficulties: use the Cognition pilot platform for this crucial step.
  5. Launch your experiment: Once you're confident that everything works as expected, it's time to launch your experiment publicly. Back in your Pavlovia dashboard, select your experiment and click "Run".

Next Steps and Resources

It's not just about setting up your experiment, though. There are many other factors to consider, like data collection, data analysis, and hosting your experiment. The Pavlovia platform documentation, which can be found on their Gitlab page, provides extensive resources and guidance in all these areas. As you advance, you may also want to explore collaborative features on Cognition collaboration platform.

Remember, designing and conducting online experiments can be challenging, but also extremely rewarding. With tools and platforms like Pavlovia and Cognition, the process becomes more accessible and manageable.

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