Mouse-tracking, the analysis of mouse movements in computerized
experiments, is a method that is becoming increasingly popular in the
cognitive sciences. The mousetrap package offers functions for
importing, preprocessing, analyzing, aggregating, and visualizing
mouse-tracking data.
The mousetrap package is developed by Pascal Kieslich, Dirk Wulff,
Felix Henninger, and Jonas Haslbeck. It is published under the GNU
General Public License (version 3).
An overview of the functions in this package can be found
online.
It can also be accessed from within R using ?mousetrap once the
package has been loaded. Please see
news for a summary of
changes in the package. Questions about using mousetrap can be asked
in the
forum.
The mousetrap package offers functions for importing mouse-tracking
data in different formats and from various sources. One option to
collect mouse-tracking data is by using the open-source graphical
experiment builder OpenSesame in combination
with the mousetrap-os
plugin.
The current stable version is available on CRAN and can be installed via
install.packages("mousetrap").
To install the latest development version from GitHub, you need the
devtools package . The development version can be installed via
devtools::install_github("pascalkieslich/mousetrap@master").
Questions about using mousetrap can be asked in the
forum.
If you use the mousetrap package in your published research, we kindly
ask that you cite the associated article:
Wulff, D. U.*, Kieslich, P. J.*, Henninger, F., Haslbeck, J. M. B., & Schulte-Mecklenbeck, M. (2025). Movement tracking of psychological processes: A tutorial using mousetrap. Behavior Research Methods, 57, 307. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02695-2
We thank Johanna Hepp for helpful comments on the documentation of this package and Monika Wiegelmann for testing a development version. This work was supported by the University of Mannheim’s Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences, which is funded by the German Research Foundation.