The Plotter Panel provides viewing, graphing, and fitting capabilities for the session results; it can be accessed at any time by clicking on the 'Plotter' icon found on the toolbar. Results for the latest sessions are always available from this panel, and previous sessions can also be imported there.

In this panel, the following elements are displayed:

1) Session Results
2) Data Plot
3) Data Table
4) Data Fitting

All information shown in this panel has been stored in session data files (*.dpkmx). See the "Understanding the Psykinematix Files" section for more information on the different files created by Psykinematix.

Session Results

This table contains a list of the session results accumulated during the running of Psykinematix. The results are created at the end of each session and may consist of several data sets. Session results can be added or removed from the table using the '+' and '-' buttons below it. Adding results can be done easily by importing data previously saved in session files (*.dpkmx) using the '+' button or importing them from the Subjects Panel that keeps a list of sessions performed by each subject. The most recently added sessions always appear at the top of this table.

All session results are represented in this table through a hierarchical structure (the triangle before each entry reveals the next level). Press the "space bar" or "return" to expand/collapse the selected entry. Option-clicking an entry opens the next levels recursively. In this hierarchical structure:

  1. The first level consists of the experiment entries where the three columns specify the experiment name and ID, the subject name and group, and the session index and date, respectively. Clicking on an experiment entry automatically updates the Data Table with a result summary for the session as illustrated below (e.g. the list of independent variables, measured thresholds obtained for each experimental condition, events timing, etc).

  2. The second level displays the list of data sets collected for each method and procedure. For example, a data set would be created for each staircase in an experiment with multiple interleaved staircases (i.e. one data set per experimental condition). At this level, the three columns present different information for each data set entry: the name of the method or procedure as defined in the "Experiment Design" Panel, the condition name, and the list of variables as defined in the "Trial Design" method (if used). Clicking on a method entry automatically updates the Data Table with the data collected during the session for this particular method (e.g. method parameters like change rates, reversal number and threshold estimates, or procedure parameters like values of stimuli variables, subject's responses and cumulative scoring for each trial).

  3. The third level contains various pieces of data collected during the session as specified by the first column and that can be plotted separately as function of the trials: parameter values, measured thresholds, reaction times, scoring, etc. A graphical representation is always plotted in the graph view for the currently selected data entry (see Data Plot below).

Data Plot

The data selected in the 3rd level of the Results Table are automatically plotted in the graph view with appropriate legends and axes labels. The graph can be either printed, copied or saved by control-clicking inside the view and selecting one of the available options (the produced image is in PDF format and can be easily converted to other formats using the Mac OS X Preview application).

The plot appearance can be customized by clicking on the settings button to access the "Graph Properties" palette. This palette allows to specify:

  • Style name

  • Graph title
  • Title size (in points)
  • Title position

  • Axis labels
  • Label size (in points)
  • Axis scale (linear or log)
  • Axis range as minimum and maximum values
  • Number of ticks along the axis
  • Tick size (in points)

  • Appearance of the data symbols and lines
  • Color of the symbols and lines,
  • Size of symbols (in pixels)
  • Thickness of lines (in pixels)
  • Legend position

To add a new style or modify a pre-existing one, select the 'Add New' option in the Style pop-up menu to duplicate the previous selection and then change its name and specification. Select 'Remove' to delete the currently selected style (note that only user-defined styles can be modified or deleted). User-defined styles are automatically saved in Psykinematix preferences.

The padlock icon next to the Style pop-up menu can be used to lock the style properties which may be otherwise overwritten by some default settings when selecting a new data set. Note that you can always use the built-in 'Default' style to let Psykinematix guess the best graph settings for a particular data set.

Data that represent either performance, reaction times (RT) or measurements as function of conditions ("Results") can be also fitted with a psychometric function or a custom model using the available tabs on the left side of the graph view that provide fitting and analysis capabilities for each type of dataset (see Data Fitting section).

Data Table

Data associated with each level of the session results are available in the Data Table window revealed by clicking on the "Data Table " button in the bottom left-hand corner of the Plotter panel (this window can appear either as a drawer attached to the Plotter panel or as an independent window, see the option available in the Admin Preferences to switch between these 2 modes). Depending on the selected level of the session results, one or several tables may be presented with data organized in columns which can be re-ordered.

A group of columns or lines can be selected and either be printed, opened in Excel or Numbers, or exported to a text file by control-clicking inside the table (press ⌘–A to select the whole table). A data cell can be copied by double-clicking on it. Note that when opened in Excel, the data are automatically pasted in a temporary file called "pkxtmp.xls" which is then saved in "~/Documents/" where any previous data will be overwritten, so it is highly recommended to save this file under a new name if you decide to edit it.

Data can be also exported directly from the 1st level of the Results Table by control-clicking on one or multiple selections: when exporting to Excel or Numbers the different data sets are concatenate in a single file, when exporting as a text file each data set is automatically saved under a name derived from the experiment index, the subject's name, the group, and the session index (ie: Exp_<ID>_Subject_<NAME> (<GROUP>)_Session_#<SESSION INDEX>):

Note that there is an option in the Report Preferences to indicate whether to automatically create a text file (*.txt) with the session data along other session files (*.dpkmx, *.lpkmx and *.rpkmx).

UA-20124358-1