MediaLab Sample Experiments

Tutorial and Additional Samples

A good way to get the feeling of how MediaLab works is to run a couple sample experiments and then look to see how they were put together. If you are new to MediaLab you can get the gist of things by running through the quick on-line tutorial. From the main menu in MediaLab, select Help > On-Line Tutorial. The text from the six steps of the tutorial are also contained in this section (see Sample 1) in case you would rather work from a hard copy (if you are reading this online, you can always right click any topic and select Print).

After that, you can take a look at any of the additional sample experiments that illustrate the basic features of MediaLab. They are contained in the C:\MediaLab\Samples folder. With the exception of the first basic sample, all the samples are zipped and will need to be unzipped in order to use them. If you are using Windows XP or later, you can do this by right clicking on the zip file and selecting Extract All.

Other Sources for Samples

www.empirisoft.com/support - see MediaLab: Shared Experiments

This new area is provided for you to post your MediaLab experiments, questionnaires and other MediaLab related files for others to play with. Feel free to post away! Also, feel free to comment on any posts if you happen to try them--sort of an informal peer review process. We may edit posts when we deem it necessary. Please zip your files and folders whenever possible! Note that you will need to register to download files, but registering is quick, easy and free.

www.psych.uiuc.edu/~roese/mlhouse.htm - the MediaLab Warehouse Website

The MediaLab Warehouse is a shared software project by which researchers can exchange operationalizations of particular tasks created for use with MediaLab, thereby facilitating research by reducing duplication in programming effort.
 
MediaLab is a software package for use in psychological experiments. The software was created by Blair Jarvis and his company, Empirisoft. The chief advantages of MediaLab are its ease of implementation (no formal programming required) and its flexibility with regard to multimedia presentation (image, video, sound). An additional advantage of MediaLab, now becoming increasingly apparent, is its modularity. In other words, particular components of an experiment, from the core manipulations to distractor tasks, from cognitive load manipulations to self-esteem scales, from cued recalls to thought-listings, may be created independently and saved as separate files. Such files may then be plugged into separate experiments.

Once a single computer file specifying a discrete procedure is created, one may reuse it, or better yet: SHARE IT. Why recreate the wheel each time you run a computer-based experiment? If someone else has created a perfectly good cognitive load manipulation, for example, why not use theirs? Of course, to make use of all this flexibility and functionality, you need to buy MediaLab. MediaLab is a commercial product and you must pay for it. The modules that plug into it, however, may be shared in the same noncommercial scientific spirit as all custom-created research materials.

This was the idea behind a database of MediaLab modules created by Neal Roese on an intranet at Northwestern University in 1999. In Jan 2001, the MediaLab Warehouse went online as an internet resource directly descended from that earlier intranet version. This resource was initiated by Neal Roese (University of Illinois) and Cynthia Pickett (University of Chicago), but in time we hope that the list of contributors will swell into a truly collective project. This resource remains small, but is growing steadily with new contributions from viewers like you! Keep sending them! Eventually, we will organize the contents into a searchable database.

Email submissions as attachments to either Neal Roese or Cynthia Pickett.

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