The PEBL Psychological Test Battery

About the Battery

This site is for a battery of psychological tests implemented in PEBL and distributed (and redistributeable) freely. They are designed to be easily used on multiple computing platforms, running natively under Win32, Linux, and Macintosh OSX Operating Systems. The tests are designed to use only keyboard input and only visual stimuli, to enable easy use on laptops in diverse environments.

The current version of the battery 0.3. It is designed to work with PEBL version 0.09 which was released in 2008. The battery is distributed with version 0.09, (it can be found in Program Files\pebl\battery) but it is also available on its own so that updates to the battery can be made without impacting the main PEBL package.

These tests are designed to closely resemble many commonly-used psychological tests, some of which are only available on limited computing platforms or cost hundreds of dollars. Each experiment saves the complete data set for later analysis, and computes basic analyses that it writes in report format. Details about the tests are found in the battery.txt file that is distributed with the library.

Tests
The following table describes the basic tests currently implemented in the PEBL Test Battery. Many of them represent the only Free version of proprietory tests available anywhere. They include a free Iowa Gambling Task, a free version of the TOVA®, a free Wisconsin Card Sort Test®, a free version of Conners Continuous Performance task, and a number of other useful tasks, with more to come.

PEBL Test	Version of:	Description	Screenshot (click to enlarge/animate)
1. Bechera's Gambling Task	Bechera's Iowa Gambling Task ® wikipedia	Choose from four decks, each choice with a cost and each providing reward. Used for tests of executive control
2. The "Hungry Donkey" Task	A version of Bechera's Gambling Task for children	The donkey chooses from four doors, each door has a cost and reward in apples. Used for tests of executive control
3. TOAV: Test of Attentional Vigilance	TOVA®: Test of Variables of Attention wikipedia	22-minute test requiring subject to detect a rare visual stimulus (top or bottom). Used to diagnose ADD, ADHD, etc.
4. PEBL Continuous Performance Test	CCPT: Conners Continuous Performance Task wikipedia	14-minute vigilance test requiring subject respond to non-matches. Used to diagnose ADD, ADHD, etc.
5. PEBL Perceptual Vigilance Task (PPVT)	Wilkinson & Houghton's Psychomotor Vigilance Task wikipedia	A vigilance task used to detect vigilance and sleep lapses.
6. Berg's Card Sorting Test	Berg's (1948) Wisconsin Card Sorting Test® wikipedia	Sort multi-attribute cards into piles according to an unknown and changing rule.
7. Simple Response Time	A common laboratory test wikipedia	Detect the presence of a visual stimulus, as quickly and accurately as possible
8. Digit Span	A component of many intelligence tests wikipedia	Remember a sequence of digits
9. Partial Report Procedure	Lu et al.'s (2005) update of Sperling's iconic memory procedure. wikipedia	May provide an early-warning sign for Alzheimer's.
10. Implicit Association Test	A test of automatic associations between memory representations. wikipedia	Tests association between two sets of binary classifications.
11. Tower of London	Traditional problem solving/planning task wikipedia	Tests ability to make and follow plans in problem solving task.
12. Symbol Counter Task	Garavan (2000) counter task	Useful indicator of executive control
13. Four choice response time	Wilkinson & Houghton's 4-choice response time wikipedia	Respond to a plus sign that appears in one of four corners of the screen
14. Timewall	UTC Test battery's Time wall	Estimate the time when a moving target will reach a location behind a wall
15. PEBL Compensatory Tracker	Similar to Makeig & Jolley's CompTrack	Use mouse/trackball to keep a randomly moving target inside a bullseye.
16. Lexical Decision	Meyer & Schvaneveldt's LDT wikipedia	Determine whether a stimulus is a word or nonword.
17. Mental Rotation	Shepard's mental rotation task wikipedia	Determine whether two figures are identical, subject to rotation.
18. Matrix Rotation	UTC test battery matrix rotation	Determine whether a 6x6 matrix is the same (with rotation) as another.
19. Spatial Cueing	Posner's attentional cueing (spotlight) task. wikipedia	Given a probabilistic cue of where a stimulus will appear, respond as fast as possible.
20. Two column addition	UTC test battery's 2-column addition	Add three two-digit numbers and respond quickly and accurately.
21. Stroop task	Stroop's attention task	Respond to either the color or name of stimuli
22. PEBL Manual Dexterity	original	Move a noisy cursor to the target

If you have any general questions about PEBL or the PEBL Psychological Test Battery, you can contact us at: pebl-list@lists.sourceforge.net. Email support is available free-of-charge. You can sign up for this email list or browse the archives here. More information about the main author is available here. Enquire on the list if you are interested in paying someone to write new experiments or modify existing ones for your needs.

http://pebl.sourceforge.net/battery.html
Last Modified 10-2008