PXLab Lab Course Experiments

The experiments on this page are described in the book Irtel, H. (1991). Experimentalpsychologisches Praktikum. Heidelberg: Springer.

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Here are some experiments not contained in the original lab course. These experiments work "in principle". This means that the basic methods work, but the number of trials will be less than necessary for real data collection.

Global and Local Attention

The task in this experiment is to focus on the small letter elements of a pattern which itself constitutes a letter. This is a modified version of a task used by Navon (1977).

Navon, D. (1977). Forest before trees: The precedence of global features in visual perception. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 353-383.

Inhibition of Return

This is an attention task about the dynamics of the focus of attention as described by Posner and Cohen (1984).

Posner, M. I., & Cohen, Y. (1984). Components of visual orienting. In H. Bouma and D. Bouwhuis (Eds.), Attention and Performance X (pp. 531- 556). London: Erlbaum.

This is a lexical decision task with priming and an adaptive response time window. Depending on the error rate of the subject the response window is shifted to earlier or to later. The design file is lexical_decision.pxd.

This experiment is an implementation of one of the test applications used by Stahl (2006, Software for Generating Psychological Experiments, Experimental Psychology, 53, 218-232).

This is a lexical decision task with priming. The design file is lexical_decision_simple.pxd.

This experiment presents three tasks:

1. a simple learning list;
2. a retention interval arithmetic task for 20 seconds;
3. an old/new recognition task with additional remember/know question in case of 'old' responses.

The experiment shows how time out limits for blocks may be created, how conditional stimulus presentation is controlled and how descriptive response feedback is defined. Furthermore we have two subject groups with different learning instructions. This experiment is an implementation of one of the test applications used by Stahl (2006, Software for Generating Psychological Experiments, Experimental Psychology, 53, 218-232).

The Water Jugs Problem

One of Luchins' (1942) water jugs problems.

Luchins, A. S. (1942). Mechanization in problem solving. Psychological Monographs, 54, No. 248.