PEBL: The Psychology Experiment Building Language

About

This is the main website for the PEBL programming language and execution environment. PEBL is:

• Free psychology software for creating experiments
• Allows you to design your own experiments or use ready-made ones
• Lets you exchange experiments freely without license or charge

PEBL is designed to be easily used on multiple computing platforms. Its current implementation uses the SDL as its implementation platform, which is also a cross-platform library that compiles natively under Win32, Linux, and Macintosh Operating Systems.

PEBL is programmed primarily in C++ (although you do not need to know C++ to use PEBL), but also uses flex and bison (GNU versions of lex and yacc) to handle parsing.

Get PEBL 0.12 for Windows Here!

The latest public release of PEBL, version 0.12, brings with it a lot of new features and capabilities. Highlights include support for a number of hardware interface devices, a new launcher, over 250 total functions, audio input, and a number of new tests in the PEBL Test Battery, and many bug fixes and improvements. Some of the biggest and most visible changes include:

• A new cross-platform launcher that is written in PEBL itself. The old launcher will probably still work if you want it to, but it is no longer possible to update it.
• The test battery has grown to nearly 60 tests, with many new translations.
• Basic support for many hardware devices, including joysticks, parallel port input/output, and serial port input and output, which allows use of a lot of USB devices such as the DLP-IO8, Cedrus RB button boxes, Lu's RTBox, and others.
• More forgiving interaction with your computer, including fallback screen resolutions, no more overwriting data files, better audio support, and improved filesystem access.

[2010-07-23]PEBL Version 0.11 and Test Battery 0.6

I've released the newest version of PEBL, version 0.11, and a new version of the PEBL test battery, called 0.6. Version 0.11 contains a lot of under-the-hood fixes to memory management. Previously, PEBL had a number of memory leaks which could end up crashing the system if it ran for too long. Most (all?) are now gone, which should improve performance. Also, a new widget called a 'canvas' is available, which lets you create more complex widgets, do pixel-drawing and other cool stuff. Using it sometimes can (reliably) cause crashes the program on windows that I have not yet tracked down, so think of it as fairly experimental right now.

Also, I've made a lot of progress toward enabling internationalized experiments. I've also now have translations of the BCST and Bechara Gambling task into polish, chinese, and korean, and translation of TOL into Spanish (and Portuguese soon). Those of you who want translated versions of these tasks can now do translations of text strings and run by specifying a two-character country code in the launcher. This comes at a slight cost--korean and chinese fonts are now included, making the download about 50% larger than last time. Also, I've moved to a default font which handles western characters much better, so accents on most european languages should be handled seamlessly.

Also, along with a windows installer, I'm releasing a stand-alone version for windows (in case you don't want to install it), and a .deb suitable for some Ubuntu linux systems. I once again have PEBL running on OSX, and will work toward a distributable version of PEBL 0.11 on OSX in the near future.

[2010-02-09]PEBL Test Battery Version 0.5
I've uploaded a new revision of the PEBL test battery, which I'm calling version 0.5. It is a drop-in replacement for the Battery Version 0.4 that comes with the last release of PEBL, and includes:

• Updates to Card sort and gambling task to support mouse control, easy internationalization, and improved visual feel.
• Improvements to the Tower of London to make it a full-fledged test.
• Substantial improvements to the trail-making test
• Several new tests that did not make it into previous batteries, including
  • matchtosample; The match-to-sample test
  • itemorder: The "item-order" test that appears in some traditional aptitude test batteries
  • mspan: A new memory span test with visual-grid input. Available both as a staircase and a build-up method (sort of like the game Simon)
  • probmon: Probability monitoring--watch 1-3 gauges for a noisy signal
  • satest: A visual situation awareness monitoring task.
  • timetap: A simple tapping test

[2009-11-16]PEBL Version 0.10.
PEBL Version 0.10 is the most stable and advanced version of PEBL yet. This version includes many new functions and tests, and a number of bug fixes. We also are offering a package that can be installed on Debian variants of Linux like Ubuntu. Release notes here Highlights of the new release include better handling of international fonts, a survey script that allows you to collect survey responses by editing a spreadsheet file. Version 0.4 of the PEBL Test Battery is available as part of the windows installer, and I'll be uploading a standalone version soon.

[2008-10-05]PEBL Version 0.09 and PEBL Test Battery Version 0.3 Released
After many fixes, I'm releasing PEBL Version 0.09! (Release notes here) This version offers many fixes, updates, and new capabilities. The test battery offers ten new tests, and updates to the popular card sorting test and gambling tests. The test battery is now distributed along with PEBL, and will appear in My Documents\pebl-exp.09\battery.

[2008-09-08]PEBL Version 0.09 beta! I'm offering a pre-release of the upcoming version 0.09. Please download, test, and provide feedback about problems you have. Documentation will be updated to reflect the new features, which include simple mouse support, rotozooming, arbitrary polygons and bezier curves, better support for non-US computers, and a bunch of updates to the test battery.

[2007-09-01] I am pleased to announce the latest release of PEBL, version 0.08. This newest version sports better handling of international character encodings (if you save in UTF8), a number of bug fixes, some new functions related to statistical analysis, updates to the test battery, including new tests (A Vigilance task, the Hungry Donkey Task (a risk/gambling task for children), a version of Sperling's partial report procedure thought to be able to detect alzheimer's at an early stage, and a skeletal tower of london. I've also changed where the standard output and error files end up being created (now they end up in the same directory a the script you run), and there should be less confusion when output is not made by a script. In addition, you can now order a bound printed version of the PEBL manual for $10 from Lulu press . This is identical to the one you can download, but some might prefer it to printing out 118 pages on their printer. This is a print-on-demand service, and usually takes a few days for them to print, bind, and ship the book, so plan ahead. The installer for windows can be downloaded here.

[2006-06-05] A number of people had noticed some problems with PEBL 0.07 on Windows. I believe I have managed to fix all the problems, and have released a new version of 0.07 to the sf mirrors. It is not named any differently, but you if you look at the file properties in Windows, it should say version 0.07.10 instead of 0.07.0. These problems did not affect any other platforms.

[2006-05-31] I have released PEBL Version 0.07. This release includes a number of useful functions, improved documentation, a bunch of new fonts, and the ability to do simple TCP/IP networking. The windows version is compiled using the VC++ Express Edition compiler, and so it may run better (or maybe worse) on some systems. Additionally, I have created a released three supplementary packages: the PEBL Image Archive, the PEBL sound archive, and the PEBL Test Battery. The Test battery represents an initial attempt to cover a number of standard tasks used in psychological and neuropsych testing, including versions of the Wisconsin Card Sort, Iowa Gambling task, Test of Variables of Attention, and a number of others. Details are available in the release notes.

[2006-01-20] Version 0.06 of PEBL is here. This release incorporates a re-working of the underlying object system that should provide better stability and enables objects to have their properties accessed directly with variable.property syntax. We sport an improved windows launcher, some international keyboard support (at least on Linux), and the ability to create and use shapes (although it is not optimized for the PPC and so unusably slow on the Mac platform). We also have a 100-page pdf and html manual, and a new wiki for posting experiments and functions. More information is available in the 0.06 release notes.

[2005-07-06] Version 0.05 of PEBL is now available. 0.05 is the immediate successor of 0.4, with the extra 0 added so as to avoid confusion later when we reach versions 0.10 and later. This release has compiled versions available for Windows and OSX (see here for help on OSX). The release focused on infrastructure, so there is not many visable new features but the core should be substantially more stable, especially with respect to memory management. PEBL cvs is now hosted on sourceforge cvs servers, which is browseable at http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/pebl/

[2005-06-03] I've managed to compile a working version of PEBL on Macintosh OSX Tiger. I haven't checked the necessary changes into CVS yet (there are a bunch of trivial ones, and a few linker tricks), but source code will be made available upon request. Meanwhile, I've added a OSX installation package to the download section (pebl_0.4.pkg.zip) for anyone interested to check out. It is command-line only, and probably will remain that way until someone creates some type of launcher. Basic instructions are here. Compiling is a real bear, because all of the base libraries need to be downloaded and compiled, and not all are straightforward, unless you use something like fink. Contact the pebl-list for more info if you are interested in trying out PEBL on a OSX!

[2005-03-01] PEBL 0.4 has been released. See below for more details.. Version 0.4 allows you to change the screen resolution, to select full-screen or windowed, and includes an executable installer script for Windows so that PEBL behaves like like people expect, with a menu option, and the main distribution living in c:\Program Files. A directory with pre-built experiments is provided in My Documents\PEBL-exp, with a shortcut to the launcher there that allows you to run experiments from that location easily. Starting with Version 0.4, we are also using the Sourceforge CVS server to host the project source tree.

For help designing and writing an experiment, you can contact the PEBL Project at: pebl-list@lists.sourceforge.net. You can sign up for this email list or browse the archives here. The PEBL WIKI allows anybody to edit or add content related to PEBL, including hints, new experiments, and library functions. Finally, there are a number of community forums to ask questions on. More information about Shane Mueller, PEBL's creator and maintainer, is available here.