Managing Subjects, Groups, and Sessions

This step-by-step tutorial teaches you how to manage your subjects, groups, and sessions. More specifically, you will learn how to:

1) add and remove subjects and groups,
2) search through the subjects and sessions to retrieve particular sets of sessions,
3) and add notes to them.

Since Psykinematix automatically keeps track of the session history for each subject, you can use it as a powerful notebook.

Introduction

First, click on the Subjects button in the toolbar. This opens the Subjects panel as shown below.

The Subjects panel consists of three tables that list the subjects, groups, and sessions, each table with '+' and '-' buttons to add and remove entries.

Note the small arrow in the bottom left-hand corner labelled Notes. Clicking on this arrow reveals a drawer containing notes about the currently selected entities (subject, group, and session).

Step 1: Managing the Subjects

To add a subject, click on the '+' button above the Subjects table.

Double-click on the default subject name to edit it and enter the actual subject name.

Use the pop-up menus inside the table to select the gender and handedness of the subject.

Make sure to select the subject in the table, enter his/her birth date in the text field above the table, and then press the Return key to validate. The birth date should always be given as "month.year" (eg: 01.1970 for January 1970).

If you need to remove a subject, click on the '-' button. A warning message will ask for a confirmation and inform you whether there are any sessions associated with the subject. It is important to note that all associated sessions will be deleted as well!

Step 2: Managing the Groups

To add a group, click on the '+' button above the groups table. Double-click on the default group name to edit it and enter the actual group name.

If you need to remove a group, click on the '-' button. A warning message will ask for a confirmation and inform you whether there are any sessions associated with the group. It is important to note that all associated sessions will be deleted as well!

Step 3: Managing the Sessions

As Psykinematix maintains a history of all sessions, selecting a subject in Table 1 automatically updates the content of the session table (3) with all sessions previously run by this particular subject.

If you have just started learning how to use Psykinematix, you have probably not run any sessions yet. Go to the Experiment Tutorials to learn how to create and run experiments, and then come back later to this tutorial once one or more sessions have been run.

The available sessions for the selected subject can be sorted according to the column (alphabetically by ID, by experiment or group, numerically by session index #, and chronologically by the date). Ascending or descending order is indicated by the direction of the small arrow in the header of the currently selected column.

If you need to delete a session, click on the '-' button below the table. A warning message will ask for a confirmation. The files that actually store the session information will not be deleted; however, we recommend only deleting sessions that do not contain any useful data (eg: the sessions created while testing an experiment design).

A search field is available below the Session table. A search can be performed according to several criteria: experiment name, experiment ID, content of session notes, group, etc. The table displays the subject's sessions filtered by the specified criterion.

Finally, an Import Sessions button allows you to import all sessions checked in the last column (highlighted in blue) into the Plotter Panel. The Switch Selection button can be used to invert the import status of the currently selected sessions.

Step 4: Adding Notes

Clicking on the small arrow in the bottom left-hand corner reveals the Notes drawer: If you have selected any subject, group, or session in the tables, their notes are shown in the drawer.

These notes can be edited to add, modify, or remove details about the respective subject, group or session selections.

Conclusion

In this tutorial you learned how to add, search, and annotate subjects, groups, and sessions.

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