jsPsych is a JavaScript framework for creating behavioral experiments that run in a web browser.

Plugin Description

The sketchpad plugin creates an interactive canvas that the participant can draw on using their mouse or touchscreen. It can be used for sketching tasks, like asking the participant to draw a particular object, or it can also be used for some image segmentation or annotation tasks by setting the background_image parameter to render an image on the canvas.

The sketchpad data is recorded in base 64 URL representation, which is a text representation of the final image that may be converted into others. Note that this plugin will quickly generate large amounts of data, so if many trials need to be recorded, consider storing the data on a server immediately (This is shown in the documentation link below), or turn off individual stroke data/storage of the final image.

Examples

Several example experiments and plugin demonstrations are available in the /examples folder. After you've downloaded the latest release, double-click on an example HTML file to run it in your web browser, and open it with a programming-friendly text editor to see how it works.

Documentation

Documentation for this plugin is available here.

Getting help

For questions about using the library, please use the GitHub discussions forum. You can also browse through the history of Q&A on the forum to find related questions.

Contributing

We :heart: contributions! See the contributing to jsPsych documentation page for more information about how you can help.

Citation

If you use this library in academic work, the preferred citation is:

de Leeuw, J.R., Gilbert, R.A., & Luchterhandt, B. (2023). jsPsych: Enabling an open-source collaborative ecosystem of behavioral experiments. Journal of Open Source Software, 8(85), 5351, https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.05351.

This paper is an updated description of jsPsych and includes all current core team members. It replaces the earlier paper that described jsPsych:

de Leeuw, J.R. (2015). jsPsych: A JavaScript library for creating behavioral experiments in a Web browser. Behavior Research Methods, 47(1), 1-12. doi:10.3758/s13428-014-0458-y

Citations help us demonstrate that this library is used and valued, which allows us to continue working on it.

Contributors

jsPsych is open source project with numerous contributors. The project is currently managed by the core team of Josh de Leeuw (@jodeleeuw), Becky Gilbert (@becky-gilbert), and Björn Luchterhandt (@bjoluc).

jsPsych was created by Josh de Leeuw.

We're also grateful for the generous support from a Mozilla Open Source Support award, which funded development of the library from 2020-2021.