A programming language for on-line control of psychological experiments

Abstract

A problem-oriented computer programming language has been developed for on-line sequence control of psychological experimentation. The language consists of nested blocks of simple English statements whose function is to produce an Automated Contingency Translator (ACT) which periodically samples and updates up to eight independent time-shared experimental environments. Experimental procedures are mapped by the ACT compiler from the English statements into a probabilistic finite state network in list structure format. An independent operating system then executes the list structure automata: that is, runs the experiments, records and retrieves data, and admits low priority background programs in any available idle time.