Back to overview
It is our understanding that in the matter of software for scientific research, the concept of open-source is the best way
to support the scientific community. Therefore, we offer a free training and testing tool for psychological experiments.
Tatool is published open-source under the GNU Lesser General Public License
(
LGPL), which means the source code of Tatool
is available for further development by everyone. We hope that fellow researchers feel encouraged to help improving Tatool by
contributing their ideas. Code of training or experimental tasks can be published under the GNU General Public License
(
GPL). Hence, researchers can easily exchange
tasks or code snippets without compromising their authorship of a specific task.
Tatool is written in Java and is thus platform independent. This allows Tatool to run on all operating systems supporting Java 1.7. It was tested on Windows, Mac and Linux systems.
The Tatool API is a library full of useful classes and methods needed to set-up psychological experiments and training studies. For example, you can choose between local or online data export, configure execution schedules, implement the built-in adaptive training algorithm or provide individual training statistics for your participants. By the way: Tatool provides the option to save all - and we mean all! - relevant or irrelevant data you can think of, in a handy CSV format. Have a look at
Tatool's API to get an idea of what Tatool is already capable of. There's something missing? Try our growing
community to see whether someone else already implemented it - and of course, feel free to just
add whichever functionality you need.
Once programmed in Java, Module XML files serve as scripts for the arrangement of the study components (e.g., instructions, questionnaires, and tasks) and for defining experimental parameters (e.g., number of trials).
XML ("Extensible Markup Language") is a text format that is readable by both humans and machines. Hence, also researchers or students without or with only few programming skills can adjust flow and parameters of a study.
Tatool comes with a ready-to-use GUI for your experiments or trainings. There are several participants using the same computer? No problem, Tatool allows different users to use the same installation. In addition, different users can use Tatool in different languages. Currently, Tatool can be used in English and in German.
Tatool Online is a web-based interface for managing your study online. You can add your study, create experimental groups and add participants easily via a web frontend. One benefit of Tatool is that while you can easily distribute your experiments via internet, it will still run offline and hence still provide accurate measurements of reaction time based on the local machine. Participants can then upload the data produced to Tatool Online which provides monitoring tools and some basic statistics.
Have a look at a running version of
Tatool Online with the following
demo account:
Username: tatonline
Password: demo
There is something missing in Tatool? You're invited to change every bit and byte of the source code! The software architecture enables you to shape Tatool the way you want it. Tatool can be extended with new tasks, statistics, level or timing concepts and with everything else we didn't think of yet. There are no limits - whenever you want to add your own specific functions, just do so!
