Analyzing Log Files From Pavlovia

How do people tend to analyze log files? Are there any packages out there to do so, or do people tend to resort to custom scripts each time?

Hey @rkempner, lovely question!

Personally, I haven’t run that many studies via PsychoJS/Pavlovia yet, but with systems I developed in the past, I have also developed associated packages/frameworks. It often didn’t really have a lot of added value though; if you build something flexible enough to deal with all the different data structure a system like PsychoJS can produce, you risk just building R/dplyr again :). See Inner Platform Effect.

On a different level I have built something that might be useful: the splithalfr package (preprint) for calculating split-half reliabilities. To prevent the Inner Platform problem, I modeled my functions after base R functions (apply).

Best, Thomas

I see, I was naive to the fact that R can actually handle log files.

Thanks! Thanks for the link to Inner Platform and your package.

You’re welcome! It can as far as I know, but the data wrangling can vary a lot per task. It’s quite a challenge to build something more elegant and powerful than what R and standard packages already offer. If you’d have a specific task that’s used often, then it might pay off to standardize data structures and build something for that.

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