Neat--Neurocognitive Experiment Authoring Tool

Experimentation in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience often involves thetime-controlled presentation of text, pictures, sounds, or other types of stimuli, and the collection ofbehavioral responses. Given that each individual laboratory and experiment has somewhat idiosyncraticrequirements, development of software for experiment control is usually a time-consuming and expensiveprocess, often entailing substantial duplication of effort between laboratories. The existence ofconvenient, flexible, and powerful authoring tools for cognitive experimentation would accelerate theprogress of research and would reduce associated costs. We will develop an advanced laboratorysoftware package, the Neurocognitive Experiment Authoring Tool (NEAT), that will provide precisecontrol over event timing and stimulus characteristics with unprecedented flexibility and simplicity inexperiment design and implementation. NEAT will be optimized for experiments collecting reactiontimes, event-related potentials, functional brain images, and other cognitive and/or neural measurements.It will initially run under Microsoft Windows and will offer a user-friendly graphical interface forexperiment scripting, compatibility with popular multimedia tools for development of sophisticatedgraphic or auditory stimulus sets, facilities for timed control of external devices, and functions fororganizing and exporting behavioral datasets.