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I find the IPad to be a great piece of hardware that is easy to bring along and that has an intuitive touch interface. This would make it an ideal platform for many cognitive tests such as n-back. As the IPad seems to have a short response latency (observation based on the plethora of music aplications available) reaction time tests should also be able to work ok.

My question is: Are there any cognitive tests, or test suits, available on the IPad (and possible the Iphone).

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My guess is that any web-based test is also suitable for iPads and iPhones, right? (Well, with the exception of flash-based ones.) – Alpha Feb 28 '12 at 23:35
Perhaps I'm ignorant to the latest software, but I'd assume most web-based testing isn't great for getting reaction times. Some apps that can do E-prime style reaction time experiments would be most interesting. – zergylord Mar 1 '12 at 0:27
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Note that your claim about the shortness of response latency is questionable. I have not played around much with iPads, but if there is something like 1/10th of a second delay (as the video suggests) then that is completely unacceptable for psychometrics. – Artem Kaznatcheev Mar 15 '12 at 7:40
Agreed with Artem. It's very risky to do this until hardware such as that shown in the video linked to becomes widely available. – vizzero Mar 22 '12 at 12:12

3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

@Jeromy Anglim: I'm actually creating a serial response time task (a widely used learning task) for the iPad now. We hope to get it up in the appstore soon but I'm using it along with a few others for my master's thesis. We're almost done putting the finishing touches on the task and hope to post a youtube video soon of the task. We're not intending to make any money off of the app and will be providing the source code for empirical scrutiny and maybe improvement of the paradigm (once it comes out).

As per the general discussion concerning RT and psychophysical properties of the iPad: In my task I am not necessarily concerned with the perceptual delay appearing AFTER you've touched an object. Rather I'm more concerned about the delay in the iPad's speed of registering a touch on the screen as I'm saving response time based upon the participant touch. I'm not very familiar with the steps involved in the touch registration process but assume a piece of the overall 100 ms delay is in the time it takes for the iPad to register the touch. I also assume that this would be a relatively small proportion of that 100ms. However, I then have to worry about the time at which the iPad's hardward and then iOS "grace" my app with this information (about this, I'm completely clueless). As my task is about visuomotor implicit learning I may expect to see differences across time on the order of tens of milliseconds and so am certainly concerned about the touch registration delay from: screen touch >> hardware >> iOS >> my app.

Any ideas on this second form of delay?

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Thanks for the answer, Dan, welcome to the site! Interested to be hearing more about this! – Andy DeSoto Apr 2 '12 at 13:33
@Dan Welcome to the site. It's great to have someone with your expertise involved. It sounds you may have a separate question. If so, perhaps you'd consider editing your answer and moving the question component into a separate question? – Jeromy Anglim♦ Apr 30 '12 at 23:55
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I would say there are no such tests/toolboxes, that would allow you to properly conduct any cognitive testing on iPhone, iPad or even using web-based applications. There are some games that attempt to do it, like the one suggested by @Speldosa, but nothing really serious.

At the moment there seem to be no way to control and record different variables (like reaction time) as tightly as with desktop application, like Psychtoolbox or Neurobehavioural System Presentation (you will find plenty of problems there anyway). What's more, iPhone and iPad are tightly controlled platforms, and developers are limited in getting access to some user parameters and data. For example getting informations about parameters like brightness/contrast or volume would be important for cognitive testing apps by default. But it's unlikely to be possible with the current Apple policy (I would bid more for Android devices, as they are much more open for such purposes).

I agree tho that touch panels are promising platform. I imagine people do work on that in some labs, using jailbroken devices, but I am not aware of anything available in the public domain at the moment.

Another issue is novelty of using touch devices. People didn't tested them yet in terms of proper psychophysical accuracy, it's still undiscovered area. Potential seem to be very promising (think eye tracking using iPad camera for example), but we shall see what comes out of it.

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Not all cognitive tests involve RT, though. Standard laboratory memory tests would be just fine if administered on a tablet (assuming you wouldn't want to look at latency data later, although the times would be much higher and therefore more proportionally accurate anyway). – Andy DeSoto Mar 16 '12 at 15:54
@AndyDeSoto: Sure, but you probably want to control the duration of stimuli appearance on the screen in case of memory tests. At the moment, anything that involves any time measurements for tablets is a gray area, and most likely not suitable from the psychophysics perspective - unless you are able to fine tune it. ArtemKaznatcheev pointed out the problem with response latency above. – Geek On Acid Mar 17 '12 at 13:49
up vote 7 down vote

FingerFriendlySoft has created an app for all iOS devices (that is, iPod touch, iPhone and iPad) that is called N-back Suite. This is, as the name suggests, an app which lets you take the n-back test.

Included are both the single and the dual n-back test and you can chose different amounts of n (from 1 to 10), five different speeds, and different type of stimuli for the two tasks (color, letters, images, 3x3 matrixes, and sounds).

You can also export your results to a tab delimited text file that you can analyse using statistical software (or by hand if you feel a bit masochistic), for example R.

So, I guess, with this example in mind, that the answer to your quesion is "yes" :)

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