Tags

‍In SuperLab, you can create a tag set and add tags to it. For example, a “Congruency” tag set can contain two tags, “Congruent” and “Incongruent”.

‍The main purpose of tags is to “describe” a trial or stimulus list item and help you with the data analysis. Each tag set that you create adds a column to the collected data file. 

‍Plan Carefully

‍It is best to review ahead of time how you plan on analyzing the data that SuperLab collects and then decide on how the tags feature can assist you. If you are not sure, it is safer to have more tags applied to the data, not less. You can always ignore the extra tags if it turns out that you don’t need them.

‍There are times when using a tag is not the best approach. An example is a list of pictures that contains both happy faces and sad faces. This sounds like a perfect application for tags: you can apply “Happy” and “Sad” tags to the list items. Instead, it would be better if you use two separate stimulus lists: one for the happy faces and one for the sad ones.

‍Applying Tags

‍Creating tag sets is straightforward. In the sidebar, click on Tag Sets. Then create a tag set and add tags to it:

‍Tags can be applied to trials, an entire stimulus list, or specific stimulus list items. To apply tags to a trial:

• In the sidebar, click on Experiment.
• Double-click on the trial; the trial editor appears.
• Click on the Tags tab if it is not selected already.
• Click on the tag (or tags) that you want to apply to the selected trial.
• Click on the Back button when done.

‍To apply tags to a stimulus list:

• In the sidebar, click on Stimulus Lists.
• Select the desired list.
• Click on the Tags tab if it is not selected already.
• Click on the tag (or tags) that you want to apply to the selected list.

‍You can apply tags to specific list items by turning off the checkbox Apply selected tags to all items in the list. But we strongly recommend against this approach because it can easily lead to mistakes. For example, adding or editing a Text list will completely remove all tags. For the other types of lists such as pictures or audio, it is easy to forget to apply tags to newly added list items, resulting in some items being properly tagged while others are not tagged at all.