In this chapter, you will learn

One of the best aspects of E-Prime is that it is so widely used. As you have seen while working through the tutorials, a variety of fields related to psychology can and do make use of the experimental paradigms covered here. A simple RT experiment (Tutorial I) is for the classic chronometrist. The Simon Task (Tutorial II) remains popular in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. The Implicit Association Task (Tutorial III) is widely used in social psychology, for example to investigate the effect of stereotypes. Playing a distracting noise while participants are engaged in various types of tasks with varying workloads (Tutorial V) can have great importance for the industrial and organisational psychologist and the burgeoning field of Human Computer Interaction. Understanding self-control (Tutorial VI) remains a hot topic in social psychology. Memory tests (Tutorials VII and VIII) are prevalent in clinical and cognitive psychology and neuroscience, whilst the Ultimatum game (Tutorial IX) and Cyberball game (Tutorial X) are popular among economists and social psychologist. Questionnaires (Tutorials IV, XII and XIV) are, of course, used in all the various fields across psychology and the mouse tracking test (Tutorial XIII) could be applied in clinical and neuropsychological practice.

Thus, E-Prime is used widely throughout psychological and cognitive science and this brings with it a very nice bonus: a number of hardware manufacturers include packages specifically designed for integrating E-Prime with their equipment. PST themselves sell the SRBOX, which comes with five buttons (‘multi-touch’), five lights (‘penta-lit’), and a microphone input (which provides the voice key functionality); but, most importantly, it has great temporal accuracy. Recently, PST also unveiled the Chronos, a USB follow-up to the SRBOX with some new and useful features. Other manufacturers, such as Tobii (an official partner of PST), BrainProducts and EGI, are also well-versed in E-Prime and often offer support and even custom packages for integrating their equipment in your experiment. In this final chapter, you will learn how to interact with various pieces of equipment from within E- Prime.

The Serial Response Box

The Serial Response Box (SRBOX) comes strongly recommended with an E-Prime licence. This is, of course, only to be expected, since the same people who made E-Prime also sell this handy, but rather ugly, little device.