ABSTRACT
In 1988, Steven Greene, a student of Yale and Northwestern, received the annual Student Award for developing a programming language to simplify the production of stimulus lists for cognitive psychology experiments. The rationale given for the research was as follows:
Too often, an inordinate amount of an experimenter’s time and mental resources is spent in the mundane task of creating stimulus lists for use in experiments. Translating the experimental design into a computer program to generate lists for individual subjects from sets of materials is not always a straightforward task, especially if the design calls for complex randomizations or counterbalancing. The process is one that is prone to error and locating the source of errors can be extremely tedious. (Greene, Ratcliff, & McKoon, 1988, p. 119)
