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. 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/.