Mac Lab Manual

THE MACLAB MANUAL (for version 1.13) Copyright 1986 Dan Costin - - 0 THE MENUS The Apple Menu The first item on this menu is "About MacLab." This tells what version of MacLab you are working with. MacLab is fully compatible with all Desk Accessories that it has been tried on. If you find a DA that makes it crash or behave strangely, and you think MacLab might be at fault, please tell me about it and I will see what I can do. The File Menu The first three items, New, Load and Save Experiment do just that: "New" creates a new experiment, "Load" gets an experiment from the disk and lets you edit it, and "Save" saves the current experiment (always asking you with what file name it should be saved). "Run Experiment" asks for three things: a) a file which contains the experiment which you would like to run, b) an output file in which to store the subject's responses, and c) a trial order file which contains a specific order in which to run the trials in the experiment. The last two items, the subject output file and the trial order file, are optional. If there is no subject output file, responses will not be saved; if there is no trial order file, the experiment will be run with the trials in the order they exist in the experiment file. Printing is supported by MacLab in two ways: if you would like to print out an experiment or an order trial file, you should load the appropriate file and, while the window the file is in is the topmost window, select the menu choice "Print Current." For experiment files, this will print the trial lines in bold-face. One should use this method of printing these types of files since when they are stored on disk they contain extraneous information. Other text files, like subject output files, can be printed using the "Print Output File" menu choice. This will just take a text file from disk and print it out as is. The only embellishments are the name of the file and the page number at the top of every page. Finally, the "Quit" menu choice allows you to quit MacLab. If there are unsaved files, a reminder is put up that you will lose any changes made since the last time you saved the files. The Edit Menu - - 1 Editing operations are not currently used in MacLab. However, this menu becomes active when Desk Accessories are used so that the DA's may use the standard text editing operations. The Order Menu This menu contains the operations necessary to deal with trial order files. These are files that contain numbers, indicating the order in which the trials in an experiment are to be run. "New Order" creates a new window in which these numbers may be entered. You can also load an existing trial order file by using the "Load Order" choice. After you have made ch…