Inquisit 3

What is Inquisit?

Inquisit is general purpose psychological measurement software that can be programmed to administer almost any psychological measure or experimental paradigm. You can download any of the ready-to-use tests from our task library, modify those tests, or create innovative new measures.

Collect data in the lab or online

All tests are executed by the Inquisit Test Engine, a flexible, high performance platform that provides millisecond precision timing of stimulus presentations and responses. The engine can be installed as a traditional desktop application for use on dedicated PCs. It can also run experiments over the web without sacrificing functionality and performance. (Note - Inquisit currently runs on Windows only. It does not yet run on Macs.)

How do web licenses work?

A single web license enables you to have one experiment online at a time, with no limits to the number of participants who can run the experiment simultaneously or in sequence. When an experiment is complete, it can be replaced with a new experiment. Additional web licenses can be purchased to support multiple studies online at once. You can run any Inquisit script, whether it came from our task library, a colleague, or you created it yourself.

How do PC licenses work?

A single desktop license is required for each PC on which you wish to install and register Inquisit. The license enables you to collect unlimited amounts of data on a registered PC. If a PC is replaced, the license can be easily transferred to the new one. Desktop licenses do not expire; you can use them as long as you want. You can run any Inquisit script, whether it came from our task library, a colleague, or you created it yourself.

Inquisit 3 Feature List

• Millisecond accuracy response time measurement for mouse, touchscreen, keyboard, serial and parallel port devices, and response boxes (for example, see devices made by Cedrus and Current Designs ).
• Present response feedback using any type of stimulus.
• Support for response deadlines and response windows that can be adjusted according to built-in or customized performance metrics.
• Provide rich performance feedback based on the latency and accuracy of responses. Present built-in tracking metrics to your participants, or create your own custom measures.
• Support for voice key response measurement using a standard PC microphone and sound card.
• Use speech recognition for measuring accuracy and latency of spoken responses. Built in support for naming tasks.

• Easily create dynamic tasks that adapt based on a wide range of variables, including sophisticated performance metrics, elapsed time, trial counts, randomly selected values, and more.
• Create stimulus sets based on user responses and performance metrics. Allow participants to select from arrays of stimuli presented on the screen. Continually add and change stimulus items throughout the course of an experiment.
• Define custom variables and update their values at the beginning or end of trials, blocks, or the experiment.
• Support for a wide range of experimental designs, randomization schemes, and task paradigms.
• Design adaptive tasks with sophisticated skip, repeat, and branching algorithms based on subject performance, elapsed time, trial and stimulus counts, and more.
• Define custom variables and update their values at the beginning or end of trials, blocks, or the experiment.
• Powerful demonstration capabilities for presentations and lectures. Ability to selectively run individual tasks, trials, blocks, survey pages, and stimuli.
• Random or predetermined assignment of participants to between-subject conditions.

• Data are saved into an text file with variable definitions that can easily be read into Excel or SPSS. Customize your data format or stick with Inquisit's smart defaults.
• Save data files to the local computer, network share, web site, ftp site. You can even have data sent to your email address as a file attachment.
• Select any of Inquisit's built-in variables and statistics to be recorded to the data file, or record your own custom metrics.
  
• Assign numeric or non-numeric identication codes to participants.
• Track web respondents by IP or MAC Address.
• Password encrypt your data files to protect sensitive information.

• Inquisit is based on an easy to use declarative scripting language similar to HTML. Simply define the properties of your stimuli, trials, blocks of trials, and experimental sessions, and Inquisit handles all program flow.
• Inquisit's script editor includes an autocomplete feature, making it easier than ever to find and use Inquisit commands.
• Help system, tutorials, and samples. Get quick contextual help on Inquisit's scripting language by pressing the F1 key in the text editor.
• Inquisit 3 is backward compatible with previous versions so you can run all of your old scripts without any hassle.
• Visual designers for selecting font styles and colors.

• Display multiple questions per page.
• Allow users to navigate back and forward across pages, or enforce forward only navigation.
  
• Choose from an array of user interface options for multiple choice questions with mutually inclusive or exclusive options, as well as an "other" option with free text entry,
• Text entry with rich validation rules covering almost any input format. Use built-in validation rules for common data such as dates, phone numbers, zip codes, email addresses, or build custom validation rules using regular expressions.
• Gather ratings along continuous scales (aka Visual Analogue Scales) in which responses are made by moving a slider back and forth or up and down along a continuum.
• Conditionally add or skip pages based on prior responses, elapsed time, random selection, and a wide variety of other variables.
• Incorporate sequences of stimuli into a survey, including including text, pictures, video, sound, and port signals.
• Run surveys standalone or seamlessly integrated with performance measures.
• Record your data in ready-to-analyze tab delimited format, with each respondent saved to a separate line, or record survey data using the same file and format as that of performance trials. 
• Customize the style and layout of survey screens and particular questions.

• Administer millisecond precision experiments on the local desktop or over the web.
• Run experiments in windowed mode or fullscreen.
• Create batches of experiment scripts to be run in sequence.
• Launch experiments from the command prompt or with batch scripts.
• Define commonly used elements (e.g., stimuli, trials, instruction pages) into shareable script files that can be imported by other scripts.

Inquisit 3 Web

Inquisit 3 Web enables you to administer studies over the web so that subjects can contribute psychological data from their homes, dorms, offices, and internet cafes. With just a few mouse clicks, you can publish your study online and begin collecting data over the web.

Reach more diverse subject populations

Inquisit 3 Web expands your subject pool by allowing participants to perform psychological tests and experiment at a time and location of their convenience. Web studies are a great option for reaching populations who cannot come into the lab due to geographic location, scheduling conflicts, or anxiety. (Note - Inquisit currently runs on Windows only. It does not yet run on Macs.)

Unlimited numbers of participants

Inquisit 3 Web includes an easy to use control panel for deploying experiments online. No knowledge of web server administration is necessary. The web license includes free hosting on millisecond.com, or you can optionally host experiments on your own web server. To access your data, simply login to your account, browse to your data files, and select which files to download. The data are saved as tab-delimited text that can be loaded into any analysis package (e.g., SPSS, Excel).

How accurate is timing over the web?

When a participant browses to the experiment launch page and clicks "Start", the engine is downloaded and runs locally on the participant's machine, where it has access to all of the high-peformance native Windows components it needs to achieve millisecond precision timing. In fact, Inquisit 3 Web uses exactly the same powerful and fast engine that Inquisit 3 desktop uses. The engine is only 700k compressed (about the size of an iPhone picture), so it take just a few seconds to download. We've wrapped the engine in several web technologies that provide a smooth download experience across a wide variety of web browsers.

Variability in client computers

One consequence of running web experiments is that web client PCs vary in processing speed. Inquisit is a lightweight, efficient engine that performs well on even the slowest computers still in use today.
Besides processing speed, computer graphic displays may vary in both display resolution and vertical refresh rate (i.e., how quickly the screen repaints itself). To control for different display sizes, Inquisit allows you to define the size and layout of visual stimuli as a percentage of the screen size, so the display scales appropriately given the size of the monitor. Although Inquisit cannot control the vertical refresh rate of the monitor, Inquisit can detect the parameters of the display system and be configured to either screen participants whose hardware doesn't meet standards, or record the refresh rate to the data file so it can be treated as an independent variable. 

Where can I try an Inquisit 3 Web experiment?

To see what it's like to participate in an Inquisit web experiment, we have dozens of measures available online in the Millisecond task library. Just click the measure you are interested in, and then click the "View Demo" link on the home page for that measure.

Can I evaluate Inquisit 3 Web?

Follow this link for instructions on evaluating Inquisit 3 Web. Note that without a license, you can run experiments online but the data will not be saved. You can use the free trial of Inquisit 3 Desktop to see how data are saved since the format is identical to that of Inquisit 3 Web.

Inquisit 3 System Requirements

Minimum Requirements

Minimum Requirements for Speech Recognition

• Minimum Pentium 166 processor
• Minimum 48MB RAM
• Sound card & sound card device driver supported in Windows Quality microphone, such as close-talk or handset mic
• 16 kHz/16 bit sampling rate for input stream

Inquisit is an open-ended programming platform, so it is theoretically possible to design an experiment that would exceed the capacity of the most powerful computer on the planet. As a simple example, your experiment could attempt to load and present a billion images, each of which is billion pixels in heigth and width, which would easily choke even the best machines rolling off the production lines at Dell, Compaq, or Gateway. Generally speaking, if your experiment involves lots of pictures and/or video, you'll want to have a decent graphics card along with enough system RAM to buffer all of the pictures used by the experiment. If you are using speech recognition or voice key input, or you are presenting audio files, you should invest in a decent sound card, along with enough system RAM to buffer your sound files. Otherwise, if your experiment involves little or no media files or audio streams, the minimum system requirements should be more than adequate.