PsyScript Manual — Getting Started
PsyScript was the Mac-based experiment authoring tool developed and maintained at the University of Edinburgh Psychology Department. This page archives an overview of the user manual — the entry point for researchers and students learning to script behavioural experiments without writing low-level code.
The original PsyScript manual was hosted at subjectpool.com/psyscript/manual as part of the department’s open documentation. The PHP-driven version that ran on the live site eventually broke after MySQL function deprecations made the original codebase unrunnable on modern PHP — which is why the Wayback Machine’s later snapshots of this page return error fragments rather than usable manual content. We’re preserving what we can recover and reconstructing the structure from the other working PsyScript pages on this archive.
What the manual covered
Installation and setup
PsyScript shipped as a Mac application. The original installation instructions covered:
- Compatibility (Mac OS Classic and early OS X versions)
- Required disk space and memory requirements
- Setting up the experiment folder structure
- First-launch configuration
For installation instructions, see the related PsyScript Downloads page.
Authoring your first experiment
The manual walked researchers through building a complete experiment file step by step:
- Defining the experimental session structure
- Setting up trial blocks and randomisation
- Specifying stimuli (visual, auditory, text)
- Capturing participant responses (button press, key press, response time)
- Logging data to disk
- Testing and debugging the experiment file
The trial structure
The core abstraction in PsyScript was the trial — a unit of stimulus presentation plus response capture. The manual covered single-trial design extensively, then expanded to block structures, mixed designs, and complex randomisation schemes. The Trials Introduction page on this archive has a more detailed walkthrough of the trial concept; the Trials Reference covers the full API.
Working with libraries
The manual introduced PsyScript’s library system for sharing experiment components across studies — see the Libraries documentation.
Advanced features
For advanced experimental designs, the manual referenced specialised pages including the Author Aid tools for managing complex experiments and the Features Reference for the complete feature index.
For modern researchers
While PsyScript itself is no longer actively maintained, the conceptual framework it pioneered — visual experiment authoring, trial-based design abstraction, automated data logging — is now central to modern tools including PsychoPy, jsPsych, Gorilla.sc, and OpenSesame. If you’re building experiments today, those tools are the better starting point. This archive remains useful for understanding the design tradeoffs behind early experiment-authoring software and for researchers maintaining legacy PsyScript codebases.