I have tried searching for a nice online demonstration of the classic Posner’s cueing paradigm without much success. A pretty good one can be found at the APA Online Psychology Laboratory. It is nice in the way that it allows adjustment of the visual angle for individual conditions. But the experimental procedure for example lacked a blank ITI (inter-trial interval), which made it very difficult to prepare for the upcoming trial (thus virtually unusable), and in the end the app crashed so I did not get my results. Importantly, it does not allow you to tweak the parameters of the task.

So I’ve decided to create my own online demo! It allows you to choose between a central (endogenous) arrow cue, central symbolic cue, and a peripheral (exogenous) cue, you can set the ratio of valid to invalid to neutral cue trials, and you can adjust the SOA (stimulus onset asynchrony) between the cue and the target. Hope someone will find it useful.

It is not meant for real data acquisition, but solely as a demonstration for educational purposes. No warranties.

You can run it from this separate page, which also provides the description on how to use it, what to try, etc, including the whole source code. A nice general explanation what the Posner task is about can be found on Wikipedia or at the APA website.

Click the image to open the experiment

It is implemented as a Java applet in NetLogo, which is not really suited for such things (it is a simulation tool, where precise real-world timing usually is not a concern), but still it works remarkably well, I must say.

You are likely to get security warnings because the app does not have a digital signature. But you can trust me that it won’t do anything bad to your PC, so just accept and allow everything and it should run just fine. Some browsers may refuse to run it anyway (security reasons) if you do not have the latest Java version. You can find it here. Note that even if you have a 64bit system, your browser can be a 32bit application, so get both versions to be sure. Some browsers, like my Firefox, still refused to run it, so I had to manually add an exception in the Java control panel. It is simple: In Windows, open the Control Panel (in the Start menu) > Java icon > Security tab > button “Edit Site List…” > button “Add” > enter “http://www.ondrejhavlicek.com” > Ok buttons.

If you like it, drop a comment, if not, do that as well please!