Patent ID: 8142196

Claim:
An experiment generator for developing psychological experiments with each experiment composed of a number of trials, wherein each trial involves several experimental objects/operators and a collection of responses, wherein the trials are grouped in blocks and sets of blocks make up a session for each experiment being generated, the experiment generator comprising: a first computer database spreadsheet associated with the session for the experiment being generated; a second computer database spreadsheet associated with the blocks for the experiment being generated, the second computer database spreadsheet being subordinate to and interconnected with the first computer database spreadsheet; a third computer database spreadsheet being associated with the trials of the experiment being generated, the third computer database spreadsheet being subordinate to and interconnected with the second computer database spreadsheet, whereby three dependent, interconnected, hierarchal spreadsheets are provided in the experiment generator; and a time event queue manager for running the experiment being generated by a computer processor, wherein the time event queue manager will synchronize clocks, track timing, present stimuli at target onset times, and time stamp all input output actions and events.