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PsychMate is a set of software tools for undergraduate psychology students to run, develop, and analyze computerized experiments. It includes 30 psychological experiments in the areas of perception, cognition, social psychology, human factors, and cognitive neuroscience. Students run experiments themselves and see basic results immediately. The automatic spreadsheet analysis forms allow them to aggregate data and create analyses, presentations, and Web pages with a single click. Students can use the Psychology Experiment Authoring Kit experiment editor to create their own experiments in minutes and run experiments with other students using Web-based experiment-management tools. The Brain-Tutor and Brain Viewer applications teach brain anatomy and permit students to analyze fMRI brain imaging data from subjects who have performed the same memory experiments in which they participated. PsychMate has been used in 83 classes in which 1,533 students submitted 5,464 completed experiments with few (less than 1%) requests for help and a very positive rating of the research experience.
Most college psychology departments seek to provide their students with some laboratory experience and require them to take a research methods course (see Hornby & Anderson, 1994; Williams, McGraw, & Tew, 1999). Teaching these courses is challenging, given the limited budget, time, and resources available to psychology laboratory instruction. PsychMate addresses these challenges by providing a comprehensive set of tools to enable the psychology major to learn and use a variety of empirical research methods. Conceptually, PsychMate is targeted to meet a student's wide range of computing needs, including running experiments, analyzing results, creating computerized experiments, exploring brain anatomy, viewing brain imaging data, developing questionnaires, and coding videos/events. The major goal of PsychMate is to provide psychology instructors and students with the tools to enhance the students' empirical training and experience in methods courses and throughout their undergraduate careers.
PsychMate provides an integrated collection of programs that run on computers using Microsoft Windows. As a comprehensive tool for undergraduate psychology instruction, PsychMate is designed to introduce students to classic and current experiments in psychology. PsychMate teaches students research methods by providing them with tools that allow them to create their own experiments in a single laboratory session. The act of creating an experiment allows contextualizing knowledge of experimental development, design, execution, analysis, and scientific communication. Running classic...