Frequently Asked Questions

Why doesn’t psiTurk work on Windows?

Windows has very limiting security restrictions which prevent server processes from running. As a result we cannot support Windows. Instead we support all system based on an underlying Unix kernel which can run python. This include Mac OS X and Linux.

I need an experiment to do X, will psiTurk be able to do this?

Generally any standard psychology experiment can be run using psiTurk. This means experiments with multiple trials, trials which change based on participant’s past responses, experiments with multiple phases or trial types, surveys, experiment recording reaction time, mouse tracking experiments, decision making, etc… The possibilities are actually not as much a function of psiTurk as of the capabilities of programming an experiment in Javascript. Any web application or applet that runs Javascript should play nicely with psiTurk with a little hacking. psiTurk mostly just provides the server and data logging capabilities, and it is up to you to define how your experiment actually looks and behaves.

There are examples in the experiment exchange which provide a more concrete understanding of the scope of things people have attempted with psiTurk.

One place where psiTurk currently hasn’t been used is group or multi-player experiments (although we’ve heard rumors of users who have reported success with this). In addition, we are not aware of people using psiTurk yet for multi-day or multi-session experiments. This is not a technical limitation per-se but may require some hacking. We’d be happy if someone tried to do these types of experiments and reported back about what we could add to the core psiTurk code to help with this.

My university will not give me a static IP address. Can I still use psiTurk?

psiTurk requires an generally internet-addressable computer. Some universities prevent this for security purposes. There are a couple of solutions if this situation applies to you. First you can run psiturk via an ssh session on any remote computer or server for which you can launch server processes. Examples would be a lab server that has a static ip address and allows users-lavel access to particular ports. Alternative there are a number of (free) services which will give you a unix command line “in the cloud” including Red Hat’s OpenShift. Detailed instruction on how to do this are available here.

I’m trying to run psiTurk at home using a cable modem or other connection. Will it work?

In general this set up is definitely possible. However, you may need to configure the wireless router that came with your internet service to forward particular incoming ports to your device (i.e., to you laptop instead of you phone or tablet). There are many excellent tutorials about this online.

I’m having trouble with my AWS/AMT credentials

In order to use your credentials you must create a requester account on Amazon Web Services. This usually involves providing a credit card number as well as a phone verification step. Finally, some users report having to log into http://requester.mturk.com at least once to agree to the software terms.

What do I need to know about running psiTurk on a remote server?

The psiTurk command line process and server generally works great over a ssh connection. Perhaps the only thing to be aware of are that you set the host field of your project’s local configuration file to the ip address of the remote machine if you want to be able to easily access it. In addition, while the standard debug command automatically launches your web-browser, you usually don’t want this behavior on the remove machine. Instead use debug -p to simply print the correct URL and copy/paste it into a browser on your local computer.

Can you program my experiment for me?

Nope, sorry. Please check the experiment exchange for examples you might be able to draw insight from.

I’m having Javascript errors when designing my experiment. Can you help?

Sorry, but probably not. See the above about programming experiments. There are many ways of getting help with psiTurk specifically and many excellent tutorials online for developing web applications using Javascript. A good example is CodeAcademy’s Javascript lessons.

Where is the /static/js/psiturk.js file? It doesn’t appear in any of the experiments I have downloaded!

psiturk.js doesn’t actually “exists” as a file in the static folder of any project. Instead, the psiturk server/command line tool automatically generates this file. The best way to view it is by “view source” in your browser while debugging your experiment. While somewhat unintuitive, this ensures that changes to psiturk.js are linked to new versions of the overall psiturk command line tool (since they are tightly interdependent).