Jensen Verification

Inspiration

I started at RPI this fall and I've read a lot of papers since I got here. Experimental psychology papers in particular refer to experiments and tasks that are sometimes too vague and are rarely easy to set up on your own. Perhaps you have heard, but a lot of psychological findings are under fire and need are not necessarily replicable - i.e. they're bad studies. I want to verify findings and I bet other people do too, some I'm building tools that will make it happen.

What it does

Jensen Verification is the first in a series of open-source tools for verifying psychological findings using the power of modern computers and data collection. In particular, it is designed to be a virtual version of the "Jensen Box" and provide an easy-to-implement choice reaction time paradigm for windows environments.

How I built it

Visual basic and a lot of googling

Challenges I ran into

To get the accuracy I want, I had to dig into windows dlls, and figuring out how to do that and verify that accuracy was optimal was challenging.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Taking the first step in modernizing the oldschool experimental psychology paradigms.

What I learned

How to deal with windows dlls to get the stuff I need without just writing a c++ wrapper.

What's next for Jensen Verification

A pilot study with real people and documenting+refactoring so my code is human-readable

Built With

• performance-timing
• visual-basic