The Microcomputer in Social-Psychophysiological Research: An Apple II/FIRST Laboratory

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Abstract
An Apple II/FIRST microcomputing system has been established to control social-psychophysiological experiments, colled analog and digital data, and extract dependent variable measures for the monitored physiological, reportable, and behavioral processes. The inexpensive Apple II microcomputer has been augmented by a hardware floating-point processor and an A/D converter chip. In addition, the FIRST software system is employed. FIRST is an interactive, high-level, structured programming language that is sufficiently fast that tedious machine-language programming is seldom needed for stimulus control and data acquisition. The Apple II/FIRST microcomputing system, while presently employed by us in social psychophysiological research, was developed for use in animal classical conditioning research (Scandrett and Gormezano, 1980). Clearly, the system has the power and flexibility to be used in a wide variety of other laboratories.