psychTestR

What psychTestR is

psychTestR is a free R package for creating and administering behavioural experiments. Built on Shiny, it presents a sequence of test pages and records participant responses. Researchers can run experiments locally during development or in-person data collection, or deploy them to remote servers for online participation. Built-in page types include text entry, audio or video multiple choice, dropdown choices, sliders and final pages. Developers can create custom interfaces with htmltools and define additional page types; reactive pages can also be generated at run time, including pages with randomized stimuli. Experiments can display images, audio and video hosted either externally or within the app, and the documentation describes embedding jsPsych. Responses can be saved as RDS files and downloaded from the admin panel as RDS or CSV. The panel also offers pilot and live mode controls, test availability settings and participation statistics. A translation dictionary supports multilingual tests. Online deployment is described using open-source Shiny Server on Linux. The documentation says error logging is not yet complete and recommends using base R and Shiny Server logging instead.

Who it suits

psychTestR suits researchers and developers building behavioural tests with R and Shiny, whether for local, in-person or online use. It is especially relevant to projects that need custom page types, randomized stimuli or multilingual tests.

Limits

The documentation says error logging functionality is unfinished, so base R and Shiny Server logging are recommended.

Getting started

1. Open the psychTestR website
2. Install or configure the R package for a Linux, self-hosted, or web environment
3. Build the experiment from built-in or custom Shiny pages
4. Run locally for development or in-person collection
5. Deploy online with open-source Shiny Server on Linux

Verdict

psychTestR offers experiment construction, response collection and admin controls in a free R package. Its incomplete error logging is a notable limitation for teams planning deployment.