About the Software

By looking at how participants' hand movements settle into one of multiple response alternatives--and how they may be partially pulled toward other alternatives--researchers can get a sense of how a psychological response evolves over time. It's like opening up a single reaction time into a continuous stream of rich cognitive output. Mouse-tracking has been especially useful for assessing the temporal dynamics of cognitive processes, for revealing "hidden" cognitive states, and for fleshing out real-time interactions among cognitive processes. It's also uniquely appropriate for testing motor/spatial effects. Anything's possible, though. There's a lot of rich information revealed in the moving hand and MouseTracker can be very useful in many domains across experimental psychology, cognitive science, and beyond.

MouseTracker is a free-to-use, user-friendly software package that allows researchers to measure real-time hand movements from the streaming x, y coordinates of the computer mouse (while behavioral responses are made based on visual or auditory stimuli), and subsequently visualize, process, and analyze them. The software operates in a Windows XP/Vista/7 environment. Researchers can easily design and run experiments and subsequently analyze the mouse-movement data in an intuitive, graphics-based manner. MouseTracker supports many sophisticated forms of analysis and both simple and complex experimental designs. Experiments can incorporate images, letter strings, sounds, and videos. Once recorded, participants' mouse trajectories can be processed, visualized, averaged, and explored, and measures of attraction/curvature, complexity, velocity, and acceleration can be computed. Precise characterizations of mouse trajectories' temporal and spatial dynamics are available, and these can shed light on a variety of important empirical questions. It contains 3 programs:

• Runner: a data collection program where a researcher can specify stimuli files, timing, response options, among other parameters, and run participants through studies
  

• Designer: a graphics-based program to easily set up the visual layout and response alternatives of an experiment
  

• Analyzer: a graphics-based analysis program can then import participants' data from such studies and visualize, process, and analyze the mouse movements.

The software was designed with the intention of being easy-to-use so that any researcher from any domain of psychology or cognitive science (or beyond) could reap the benefits of this new mouse-tracking technique for his or her own research.