Getting started / Making an experiment
Experiment results output, Record properties
Results table and matrix, .mat and .csv files
When you run an experiment with the command runExperiment it outputs results in two variables. The first is a cell array that is meant to be easy to read in MATLAB’s visual variable editor. You can double-click it in the MATLAB workspace to open it there. The second compresses trial results into a numeric matrix or other arrays with uniform data types, which lets you extract and analyze in MATLAB without needing to convert from cell. Optionally runExperiment also saves results to both a .mat and .csv file at the end of each trial.
Specifying what to see in results – info, report
Just about everything in results comes from objects in the experiment. For any object you can specify what to see using two properties that all objects have: info and report. Both are optional—if you leave both at default, the object won’t show in results.
Custom information – info
info sets custom information to see about the object—e.g. test condition values associated with the object, in any format. You can set info to a struct with any fields containing any values you want. Field names go to headings in the results table and field values go under those headings. (Tip: Sometimes it's convenient to add a trial object and set info fields there—this groups all those values at the front of the results table. Similarly experiment object info fields can be used for information about the experiment as a whole.)
Property values – report
report is an array of strings that are names of properties for the object to show. These can include input properties which you can set when making the experiment. More commonly they include record properties which you can't set but PsychBench uses to record information during the experiment. Common record properties to report are response, responseLatency, and others for response handler elements. The documentation for each object type lists both its input and record properties.
Example
Suppose each trial has a picture element in variable pic and a keyPress element in variable recorder. For pictures we want to see custom information under headings direction and d, and we want them to report input property rotation. For keyPresses we want to see record properties response, responseScore, responseLatency. Below are table columns setting results output properties to get this (other columns not shown).
The first (pretty) results table would look like this for the first eight trials. PsychBench automatically adds some information including results file name, date/time, screen measurements used for visual angle degree units, and trial numbers and start times. The rest comes from info and report properties.
