The Psychomotor Test System

(LANGUAGE RESEARCH CENTER'S COMPUTERIZED TEST SYSTEM)

Project scientists at the Sonny Carter Life Sciences Laboratory developed a revolutionary test apparatus for research with humans and nonhuman primates. For decades, psychologists had tried unsuccessfully to build automated test apparatus that did not reduce behavior to simple responses. In our attempt to provide NASA with a valuable enrichment tool, we pioneered the application of computer technology for research with nonhuman primates. Scientists at more than three dozen laboratories world-wide have requested and received information of using the Psychomotor Test System. To date, the device has been featured in over 60 peer-reviewed publications.

This Psychomotor Test System or PTS is also known by the name of its prototype (The Language Research Center's Computerized Test System). The PTS consists of a battery of computerized tasks and the PC hardware necessary to administer them. Research participants manipulate a joystick to control the movements of a computer-graphic cursor on the monitor. Contact between this cursor and any other computer-generated stimulus is recorded as a response. Thus, humans and monkeys alike can respond to specific stimuli in accordance with the demands of a variety of tasks.

On the background image, a rhesus monkey reaches through a panel of mesh to manipulate the joystick and to retrieve fruit-flavored pellets in a matching-to-sample task.

The battery of tasks designed for the PTS represent automated versions of many of the classic testing paradigms in cognitive and comparative psychology. These include:

Psychomotor Tasks

Pursuit Tracking

Maze Solving

Attention and Perception Tasks

Stroop

Divided Visual Field Recognition

Matching-to-Sample

Signal Detection

Visual Search

Learning and Memory Tasks

Discrimination Learning Set

Transfer Index and Mediational Paradigm

Delayed Matching-to-Sample

Sameness/Difference

Serial-Probe Recognition

Several novel, game-like tasks were developed:

LASER - Shoot at moving targets

ALVIN - Reproduce sequences of buttons and tones (like 'Simon')

CONCENTRATION - Find matching pairs hidden in 'cards'

COMPETE - Play against a human or other monkey

NUMBER - Select the larger of two or more numerals

SELECT - Pick the task on which to work from a menu

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This page was last updated on 6/Jan/99, D. Washburn