The task. The goal of MEMOLAB [Dillenbourg et al. 94] is for psychology students to acquire the basic skills in the methodology of experimentation. A goal is assigned to agents, for instance “study the interaction between the list length effect and the semantic similarity effect”. The learners build an experiment to study this effect. An experiment involves different groups of subjects each encoding different list of words. An experiment is described by assembling graphical objects on a workbench. Each object associate a group of subjects, a task (e.g. read, listen, count down, free or serial recall,...) and a material (a list of words that the fictitious subjects have to study). The system simulates the experiment. The learner can visualize the results and perform an analysis of variance.
