Introduction

The SOLO research support team provides technical support to on-staff researchers at the Psychology and Child Studies institutes of the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Leiden University. This includes providing support and advice on: the development of online and offline experiments; data preprocessing and analysis; designing and developing research setups; and physiological data acquisition. SOLO cannot provide guidance directly to students who are not on staff.

Supported Hardware and Software

SOLO provides full technical support for most research-hardware and research-software commonly used at the faculty. This includes: 

• OpenSesame (& OSWeb) 
• E-Prime 
• Qualtrics
• SONA 
• JATOS 
• PhysioData Toolbox 
• Python
• MATLAB
• Rekencluster (ALICE) 
• Tobii eye-trackers and Tobii Pro Lab
• EyeLink eye-trackers
• BIOPAC devices and AcqKnowledge
• VU-AMS devices
• Biosemi devices and Actiview

Additionally, SOLO can provide limited support for research-hardware and research-software that is less commonly used, or that is not part of the faculty’s core research practices. This includes: 

• Gorilla 
• Pavlovia 
• PsychoPy 
• Brain Vision Analyzer
• Noldus the Observer
• VU-DAMS 
• Unity
• VR
• PsychToolbox
• Other research systems (e.g. Pathway, Digitimer DS5 & DS7, etc.)

Since the technical support provided by SOLO focusses mainly on the data collection and preprocessing phases, matters regarding statistical analysis will be left to the institutes. As such, SOLO cannot be relied on to provide support for SPSS, R, Tableau, etc.

Support Approach and Scope

For most standard technical support requests, SOLO will seek to produce best-effort deliverables that researchers can themselves implement in their projects. This may include task demos, code snippets with documentation, and/or (custom-built) hardware and software. It is subsequently the responsibility of the researchers themselves to evaluate the fitness of the deliverables with regards to the intended use, and implement everything appropriately. As such, it is vitally important that researchers possess the necessary skills to assess, test and accept the deliverables.

Standard technical support requests are usually limited to projects that take 80 hours or less to complete, and that can be fully realized with software and hardware solutions that SOLO fully supports. The scope of SOLO’s involvement in each project will be assessed on a case-by-case basis, and largely depends on that project’s significance and complexity, and SOLO’s current workload. Projects requiring infrastructural troubleshooting, or ones that provide a platform for SOLO to develop sharable components and/or useful expertise, are generally prioritized.

In certain cases, SOLO can also take on larger and more involved projects. This includes projects that take more than 80 hours to complete, and projects which require comprehensive development and subsequent validation to reach publishable maturity. This level of collaboration may take the form of a dedicated project, in which case SOLO resources are specifically reserved for a project for a given timespan, optionally with certain labor costs being carried by the grant. It can also take the form of a co-authorship project, where a SOLO engineer/technician is intensely involved in the project and contributes to the paper.

To request support or discuss support possibilities, please email labsupport@fsw.leidenuniv.nl. Please include as much information about the project and the desired deliverables as possible in your request.

Software License

By default, all hardware, software and code snippets released by SOLO use the GNU GPL v3 license. Please discuss with SOLO if you wish to deviate from this license to conform to grant requirements.