nodus-ponens

A light, full-stack framework for running high-level reasoning and cognitive science experiments in Node.js.

Bug fixes and updates

2024-07-29

• Added progress bar display by default
• Added ParticipantID processing in terminateDebrief.html
• Added new CSS functionality to import font weights and add fixed-width font "Source Code Pro"

2023-11-03

• Updated jQuery to latest version (3.7.1)
• Updated jQuery UI to latest version (1.13.2)
• Added middleware for accepting, logging, and returning data from third-party services (e.g., Qualtrics)

Preliminary Setup

$ sudo npm install -g shelljs       # nodus-ponens requires global installation of "shelljs"

Quick Start Guide

nodus-ponens is a full-stack framework for running high-level cognitive science experiments. It comes bundled with a fully-functional experiment template. To set the experiment up, run as follows:

$ mkdir temp
$ cd temp
$ npm install nodus-ponens
$ npm explore nodus-ponens -- npm run-script create-template
$ node main.js

The framework will launch a server-side monitoring console (in the terminal), and the experiment can then be viewed at http://localhost:55151. The default link to launch the study via a third-party service (e.g., Amazom Mechanical Turk) is: http://localhost:55151/launch. The link to launch the study via Qualtrics (which sends over specific information for logging and record-keeping), the link is: http://localhost:55151/qualtricsLaunch.

Usage

var path             = require("path");
var fs               = require('fs');
var staticDirectory  = path.resolve("static");              // Set directory of static HTML+CSS files
var dataDirectory    = path.resolve("data");              // Set directory where data will be written
var participantIndex = 0;                            // Start participant numbering at this value + 1

var np               = require("nodus-ponens")(participantIndex, staticDirectory, dataDirectory);
np.authors           = "Authors";
np.experimentName    = "Template1";
np.port              = 55151;

// Note: The user has to define the function np.loadStimuli() that is intended to take a
// participant's ID number (an integer) as input and return an array of objects representing the
// stimuli catered to that participant. The function allows users to define stimuli directly, read
// stimuli from an external file, or pull stimuli from other resources. In the template file included
// with the experiment (see Quick Start Guide above), the function "setupStimuli" serves this purpose
// by importing experimental stimuli from a CSV file. Supposing that the user successfully defines
// this function, the nodus-ponens setup proceeds as follows:

function setupStimuli(PID)          // Takes integer input and returns stimuli as set of JSON objects
{
   /* Write appropriate stimuli generation code here ... */
   return stimuli;             // To randomize the order of the stimuli, return np.randomize(stimuli)
}

np.loadStimuli = setupStimuli;
np.launchStudy();

License

(c) 2023 Sangeet Khemlani, http://www.khemlani.net/, Creative Commons License.