The concrete concept and noun explanation of E-prime

1 Introduction. E-Prime E-Prime is a psychological experimental operating platform jointly developed by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. It is an advanced graphic design environment, which provides innovative new tools to accelerate the development of experiments. E-Prime allows you to select common experimental function icons and then drag them into the experimental program in a short time. E- Prime is the abbreviation of Experimenter's Prime (best), and it is a cross-platform system to realize computerized behavior research. It is similar to all visual programming language systems, and uses the E- Basic language similar to Visual Basic. This is a graphical interface application software suite, covering from experiment generation to millisecond precision data collection and preliminary analysis. The system includes the following characteristics: graphical interface programming environment, which can realize the experimental function by selecting, dragging and dropping what you see is what you get and setting it up, which simplifies the programming; Object-oriented and easy-to-understand scripting language, similar to Visual Basic, provides many enhanced commands for behavior research, provides flexibility for programming, can help realize a more flexible and comprehensive experimental paradigm, and provides expansion space for E- Prime. Extended data analysis and output system; Data checking function; Experiment generation wizard; PsychMate system provides classic experiments needed for experimental teaching. Functions: experimental design, generation, operation, data collection, editing and preprocessing analysis data. Advantages: E-Prime can present words, images and sounds (any combination of the three can be presented at the same time), and provide detailed time information and event details (including details of presentation time and reaction time), which can be used for further analysis and help to understand the time problem of actual experimental operation. Specially oriented to psychological experiments, the time accuracy of psychological experiments is optimized. Stimulation presentation is synchronized with screen refresh, and the accuracy can reach millisecond level. Compared with the traditional programming language, E-Prime is easy to learn and use, and the experiment is generated quickly. Software includes: (1)USB key (2) original manual (1) reference guide -234 pages; (b) User's Guide-276 pages; (3) Introduction-100 Page (3) Practical application of CD 2. E- Prime According to the statistics of PST Company 200 1, there are more than 3,000 laboratories using E- Prime, and the number is increasing gradually. There are nearly 100 published articles using E- Prime, and many research works and articles are not included in the statistics. The number of laboratories using E- Prime in China is also increasing rapidly. (1), E-Prime Macwhinney and others in experimental teaching and research of psychology started a project called STEP (experimental psychology teaching system) on 200 1. This project provides teaching materials for the application of E- Prime in various learning backgrounds and the course construction of experimental psychology. Under the operation of STEP, many classic experiments are computerized with E- Prime, which can be used for experimental teaching and as experimental reference for practical research. There are nearly a hundred of these classic experiments, covering the fields of perception, memory, attention, psychophysiology, psycholinguistics, engineering psychology, developmental psychology, social psychology, cognitive neuroscience and so on. PsychMate teaching system of PST company also provides 265,438+0 classic experiments for students to experience experimental teaching with real experiments as the object. With the publication of E- Prime related work list published by PST company, we can see that many articles or experiments in research are written by E- Prime, involving perception, attention, memory, advanced cognition, cognitive neuroscience, social psychology, engineering psychology and other fields. (2) Application of E-Prime in China The Institute of Psychology of Chinese Academy of Sciences took the lead in introducing E-Prime in China in 2000. Driven by the construction of technology center and public laboratory, the learning and communication platform of E- Prime has been established. In the past four years, many teachers and students have written most experiments with E-Prime. With the communication between national psychological circles and psychological research institutes, more and more psychological research institutes have purchased E- Prime, such as the School of Psychology of Beijing Normal University, the Department of Psychology of Sun Yat-sen University, the Department of Psychology of Northeast Normal University, Dalian Medical University and so on. Some research work on the use of E- Prime has been published in the journal Psychology and Psychological Science, such as Psychological Science: Research on the Mechanism of Clue Stimulation and Basic Feature Processing, No.05, 2003, Journal of Psychology, 0 1, 2003. (3) E- Prime and laboratory construction An important aspect of laboratory construction is the application of laboratory software or system. The application of these systems is mainly divided into two aspects: teaching and scientific research. E- Prime has been widely used in laboratory teaching abroad, such as Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh University, Richmond University, George Mei Sen University, Mil2likin University and so on. In China, the experimental teaching system is still mainly the traditional psychological experimental system, such as PES of Psychology Department of Peking University. With the increasing application of E- Prime in China, E- Prime has great development space in experimental teaching because of its close to real experiments, powerful functions, flexibility and openness. E- Prime is applied to laboratory research and has become an essential tool for many laboratories at home and abroad. In China, the construction of public laboratory of Institute of Psychology of Chinese Academy of Sciences is mainly around E- Prime, such as experimental environment and hardware equipment. 3. The E- Prime (1) of the experiment generating system and the experiment teaching system is the E- Prime of the experiment generating system. In short, the E- Prime is a psychological experiment generating system with millisecond accuracy, which optimizes the stimulation organization and time accuracy for behavior experiments and provides powerful and flexible functions. For example, it can present stimuli such as words, images, sounds and their combinations; Reaction input devices include keyboard, mouse and reaction box, which also provide sound input or external connection with other devices; It provides an interface with external devices such as fMRI, which can be used for experiments in cognitive neuroscience and also provides a tool set for fMRI research. Compared with the traditional programming language, E-rime is easy to learn and use, and can generate experiments quickly, which greatly saves researchers' time in experimental programming. (2) As an experimental teaching system, E-Prime, a traditional psychological experimental teaching system, is mainly used to demonstrate experiments, and experimental activities are often limited to experimental demonstrations. But demonstration experiment is different from real experiment, and students are only passive participants. Science education researchers believe that the scientific perspective provided by demonstration experiments to students is biased. If students have real experimental experience, they will have a better understanding of science and research process. There are few opportunities for real experiments in cognitive psychology research methods or experimental psychology courses. Students are mostly exposed to tasks of paper and pen, or computerized teaching experiments that cannot be flexibly adjusted. Because modern cognitive psychology experiments are mostly computerized, this situation seriously limits the experimental teaching. Unless it is a few computer experts or professionals, it will take a long time to develop more sophisticated experiments. So teachers usually have only two choices, let students do computer demonstration experiments or do similar non-computerized experiments. However, compared with real experiments, these two methods have great defects: students have little benefit from previous experiments, or they are powerless because of the limitations of non-computerized experiments. Using E- Prime as an experimental teaching system can avoid the above shortcomings and better achieve the purpose of experimental teaching. PaychMate system provides a series of classic experiments in perception, cognition, neuropsychology, social psychology and engineering psychology. Due to the gradual popularization of E- Prime, ready-made experimental resources are very rich. In the traditional experimental teaching system, because the experimental design processes such as variable control, factor matching, reaction recording and result calculation are all controlled by computers, students cannot understand the experimental design process itself and are in a passive state, thus affecting the experimental teaching effect. Moreover, variables such as stimulus presentation, response recording, process control and their parameters are generally set by professional programmers, which limits the flexibility of experimental teaching. As an open experimental teaching system, E- Prime allows teachers and students to easily control or modify various variables and parameter settings of E- Prime demonstration experiment, so as to "see" the whole process of experimental design and understand the demonstration experiment more deeply. In addition, through E -Prime, students can easily modify existing experiments into their own. In fact, E- Prime provides a computerized "visual" experimental process, which enables students to know more about their own experimental details, define the operational definitions of various variables, and consider various related variables before collecting experimental data, so as to control or eliminate the influence of irrelevant variables and design more practical experiments, because the process of generating experiments is the process of concretizing experiments, and they can control various situations and measure the behaviors of subjects more accurately. In addition, E- Prime also provides data interfaces with SPSS, EXCEL and so on, which closely combines reaction records and data export with data analysis to help students understand the research process more comprehensively. Students who use E -Prime to conduct real experiments report that they have a better understanding of the research process such as experimental design, experimental realization and data analysis. E- Prime provides students with a complete set of processes, which can be operated concretely. 4. comparison between e-prime and DMDX. E-prime and DMDX can have different characteristics in these aspects. In terms of ease of use, the programming interface of DMDX is not as intuitive and friendly as E- Prime, and the stimulus control is mainly controlled by rtf scripts, which is not as easy to understand and master as what you see is what you get in E- Studio. E-Prime provides a view of the whole program structure, unlike DMDX program structure segmentation, which can "see" the process details of the experiment and better grasp the control and understanding of the whole experiment. In terms of flexibility and expansibility, DMDX does not provide extensible modules, and the experimental control is not as flexible and convenient as E- Prime. For example, E- Prime can realize complex grouping randomness, while DMDX can do nothing to control the complex combination of stimuli. E- Prime provides detailed data details, data interfaces and data verification functions, which can be used for preliminary analysis and data sorting and export. DMDX only provides RT and true-false reaction, so it can't check suspicious data, and there is no interface for data export. In terms of time control, DMDX deals with Windows multi-tasking, and stimulation display, timing and other issues do not provide too many details, while E- Prime provides detailed details, so that we can exclude stimuli or data with large errors (although few). As a commercial software, E- Prime provides good support for the technical problems in the software application process, and there are also many research resources available, such as the program files of many classic experiments. Because DMDX is a self-contained software, the technical support is not as good as some problems in E- Prime application (1). The time accuracy of E- Prime is millisecond, and E-Prime can present several milliseconds or even 1 millisecond stimulus. This is a misunderstanding of millisecond accuracy. In fact, millisecond precision is relative (see E- Prime's definition of millisecond precision), and E- Prime can't control 1 millisecond absolutely, which is impossible for any experimental generation software. This is because the time accuracy is greatly limited by hardware, especially the refresh frequency of the display (depending on the performance of the display and graphics card), and the display time that E- Prime can control is an integer multiple of the refresh period of the display. That is, if the display refresh period is 14 milliseconds, the display duration of 20 milliseconds is 28 milliseconds in actual implementation. Therefore, it is suggested that the display refresh frequency should be set to 100Hz and the related display time should be set to an integer multiple of 10 ms. If higher display accuracy is needed, a display device with high refresh frequency is needed. (2) The difference of reaction time collected by different input devices. E- Prime allows collecting input from various reaction input devices, such as PC keyboard, mouse, reaction box and port interface connected to external devices. These devices all have a certain delay in the process of transmitting the response of the subjects to E- Prime, that is, there are systematic errors related to the devices. These can be used as reaction input devices when the time accuracy is not high; But generally speaking, the same input equipment should be used in the same experiment, and the appropriate input equipment should be selected according to different time accuracy requirements. In fact, the time resolution of these devices is very different: the delay of the keyboard is about 7 (0.5 ms; The delay of SRBox is about1.25ms; The delay of the mouse is greater, and the range of change is greater than that of the 92ms port device. The delay depends on the connected external device. Therefore, it is best to use keyboard or SRBox for the reaction experiment, and SRBOX for the experiment related to ERP and fMRI. It is best to test the time resolution of the external equipment first. In addition, although the delay of similar devices is not much different, it is still possible for a specific device to have a large delay, such as the failure of the key spring of a keyboard. Therefore, the equipment test before the experiment can not be ignored. (3) Interface between external devices such as 3)fMRI and ERP In cognitive neurobehavioral experiments, it is necessary to communicate with external EEG devices. E-Prime provides WritePort and ReadPort commands to communicate with external devices through serial or parallel ports. You can also set the trigger signal of an external device through some properties of the signal. In ERP experiment, the key is the accuracy of stimulus presentation time and the synchronization of E- Prime stimulus events and EEG equipment. In order to achieve synchronization as much as possible, it is necessary to test and calibrate before the formal experiment to check whether the signals are synchronized and whether the clock of E- Prime matches the clock of external equipment (if not, the clock of E- Prime can be adjusted). (4) The problem of connecting E-Prime with external programs is similar to that of most high-level languages (such as VB). E-prime can also call some functions or subprocesses such as external dynamic link library files (DLL) or type library files. Through this, some functions not directly provided by E- Prime can be realized, such as playing multimedia files. However, in order to ensure the accuracy of timing, if the time data is very important, it is not recommended to use the timing system that is best used by external programs for timing. Hope to be satisfied