UniExp - An event-driven platform for experiments with realistic tasks and multiple agents

In contrast to existing general experiment software packages/tools that characterized by time control and stimulus-response paradigm to support psychology, behavioral and neuroscience studies, UniExp is an experiment platform featured by the even-driven mechanism which is an essential characteristic of many realistic tasks whose processes evolve with events, such as human operations, system status and events (such as hardware failures and alarms), environment condition changes, and so on. These events may not follow an accurate time schedule and interact with each other. An open architecture is adopted for coordination and collaboration between multiple agents (humans and systems) that participate in the same task through network. Common functions of behavioral or human factors experiments, such as user input, display of text, picture, auditory and video, questionnaire measurement, applying time pressure, and running an external program, are implementation as standard components to be automatically launched at the participant side. The platform runs an experiment following its defining script in XML format and participant arrangement file, allowing the experimenter to monitoring the whole process, and automatically recording the experiment process and data.