Mouse-tracking: A practical guide to implementation and analysis

Abstract

Mouse-tracking – the analysis of mouse movements in computerized experiments – is becoming increasingly popular in psychological research. Mouse movements are taken as an indicator of commitment to or conflict between choice options during the decision process. Using mouse-tracking, researchers have gained insight into the temporal development of cognitive processes across a growing number of psychological domains. In this chapter, we present software that offers users easy and convenient means of recording and analyzing mouse movements in their research. First, we introduce and demonstrate the mousetrap plugin that adds mouse-tracking to OpenSesame, a popular general-purpose experiment builder. It allows for the creation of mouse-tracking studies through a graphical interface, without requiring programming skills. Second, we present the mousetrap library for the statistical programming language R. This library imports mouse-tracking data from a variety of sources. It offers functions for preprocessing, analyzing, clustering, and visualizing mouse movements, and calculates many established measures for curvature, complexity, and velocity. All software is cross-platform, open-source and available free of charge from https://github.com/pascalkieslich/mousetrap-os and http://pascalkieslich.github.io/mousetrap/.