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This webinar introduces PennController for IBEX, a new platform for online experiment design. PennController provides a user-friendly yet powerful and versatile script for incorporating a diverse range of features in your experiment, such as multimedia support and dynamic unfolding of events.


Our goal for the webinar will be to reproduce this simple experiment. We will develop and host experiments on the PCIbex Farm, which comes with its own interface and requires no server setup, software installation or prior knowledge of a programming language. Focusing on fundamental concepts and the basic logic of the interface, this webinar will be useful both to researchers new to online experiments and ones with prior experience on other platforms.

PennController for IBEX and the PCIbex Farm are free to use and open-source. They are extensions of IBEX (Internet-Based EXperiments) a free, javascript-based platform allowing you to design and run experiments online in a standard browser, developed by Alex Drummond for common text-based, psycho-linguistic tasks, including self-paced reading and rating studies.


The webinar took place on Friday, June14 from 1:00 - 2:30 PM U.S. Eastern Daylight Time. 

Panelists:

Jeremy Zehr (he/him/his)

Jeremy Zehr (left) is a post-doctoral researcher with mindCORE at the University of Pennsylvania, where he works with Florian Schwarz, John Trueswell and Charles Yang. His work investigates how lexical semantics interacts with pragmatic phenomena, with a focus on presuppositions and scalar expressions. His experimental approach led him to develop PennController to extend IBEX’s capacities in the form of a standard, versatile and user-friendly tool.

Florian Schwarz (he/him/his)
Florian Schwarz (right) is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he runs a lab dedicated to the Experimental Study of Meaning. He also is Director of the graduate certificate program in Language and Communication Sciences, and Associate Director for Education of Penn’s Mind Center for Outreach, Research, and Education (MindCORE). His research spans Semantics, Pragmatics, and Psycholinguistics, with a focus on the interplay of contextual information and domain general reasoning with linguistic semantics, including topics such as definite descriptions, presuppositions, and implicatures. Much of his work combines formal approaches from theoretical linguistics with experimental methods from psycholinguistics, and he is dedicated to opening up new empirical avenues for studying meaning in natural language to bring together formal theoretical perspectives and questions about the cognitive processes involved in language comprehension in context.