| Product Name: |
MacLaboratory for Psychology: Research, v3.0 |
| Level: |
Second Year Tertiary / Third Year Tertiary / Post-grad |
| Platform: |
Macintosh® |
| Supplied Information: |
Conduct your own original research with MacLaboratory!
Design and conduct real millisecond accurate research in such areas as clinical evaluation, motivation, emotion, human cognition, motor performance, neuropsychology, social attitudes, learning, or other areas of interest. This award-winning software is thoroughly laboratory tested.
MacLab is most frequently used in Experimental Psych where Professors want students to design and run their own experiments. At schools with adequate size computer labs, it can be used in Intro Psych courses. MacLab can also be used in Biological Psychology, Sensation and Perception, Personality, and as a tool for professional research. |
| Possible Use: |
This product is suitable for Second Year Tertiary / Third Year Tertiary / Post-grad courses for use by students AND teachers in lab classes. |
| Price: |
US$405 For Site License pricing contact supplier. |
| Developer/s: |
Douglas L Chute, Drexel University |
| Review: |
MacLaboratory for Psychology consists of a suite of HyperCard stacks (Excel is also used for data collection) designed exclusively as a tool for research/laboratory exercises in psychology. It covers experiments/surveys/questionnaires in Behavioral Neurosciences, Cognitive sciences, Experimental Methods, Learning and Conditioning, Personaltiy and Social Psychology, and, finally, Sensation and Perception. There is also a Glossary stack and a Study Guide which, apparently, generates a self-test banks of questions individually assembled and randomly sorted for each user. I say apparently, because my version packed it in, it died, it would not complete the randomisation process. Indeed, that just about sums up my impression of this program: It seems great, if it worked it would be worth the effort it would need to get it up and running to form the basis of a very good system for student laboratory excercises, or even for some research purposes, in psychology. Trouble is it just would not run very well on my Mac LC630. I quadrupled the memory allocation to the HyperCard Player program supplied, but to no avail. I still kept getting warnings of not enough memory assigned. I could only get a smeary brown colour for the brain scans (the "proper" colours only came up, and then for less than a second, when I closed the program). Less to do with my system, I presume, were the error messages such as "no bkgnd field named "cdinfo. in openCard" ". With a further message to contact the publisher. This came up in the Study Guide at the end of the attempt to sort the questions to be presented. In the same stack the Study Guide Summary failed because, " Can't understand "LastItem" in StartUpError". Again, I was asked to contact the publisher. Each time the latter meassage gave a USA number.
Obviously, these problems could be due to my stupidity, or to the limitations of my equipment. But, even given this possibilty, they are not a great advert for the robustness of the program. Maybe I should have got the CD version the manual (a very thin one at that) talks about rather than a stack of floppies. I don't know!
Even though I could not get the thing to work properly there are some general comments to be made. First, this is not a multimedia package: It is heavily text-based, as one might expect given it is based on HyperCard. It is very conventional. Thus the Glossary is presented as a book on the screen (ever seen a word-processing package that presents as a typewriter on the screen?). Penultimately, it really really does need more in the way of instructions as to how to use it, and what bits of it mean (or are intended to mean). Ultimately, it does not have that absolute essential on every screen: How to quit this thing. All interactive programs have to have a "quit" button else, as in many boring games programs, one is forever switching the computer off at the wall.
I would like to be more positive, but on the evidence of my experience there are glitches here to be ironed out before one could really use this program with confidence.
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Dr Roderick Ashton, University of Queensland, 20/08/97 |
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| Supplier: |
Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 511 Forest Lodge Road, Pacific Grove, CA 93950-5098, USA |
|
info@brookscole.com
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http://www.brookscole.com/ |
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phone: (408) 373 0728 |
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fax: (408) 375 6414 |
| Date Record Last Modified: |
29/8/97 |
