PsychoPy is an open source software package, written in Python programming language, for the generation of experiments for neuroscience and experimental psychology [1][2].
PsychoPy aims (and mostly manages) to be:
- simple to use
- able to generate stimuli in real-time usign OpenGL
- totally free (open source)
- platform independent (it installs easily on Win32, OS X and Linux and scripts can be transported between them)
- flexible
- precise (spatially and temporally)
There is a great deal of documentation, including demos, on the website and a user mailing list.
The decision to use Python programming language was based on the fact that it was free (as opposed to, say, Matlab), platform independent and flexible. It also has a huge community that have written an extensive set of libraries. In particular for this project, there were Python libraries for OpenGL for numeric calculations (numpy), for very flexible gui generation (wxpython) and for interfacing with other hardware, such as input devices, parallel ports etc.
[edit] History and versions
- 2003: PsychoPy was originally written by as a proof of concept - that a high-level scripting language could generate experimental stimuli in real time (existing solutions at the time, such as Psychtoolbox, had to pre-generate movies or use CLUT animation techniques).
- 2003-2005: this was extended to be able to generate experiments in the author's lab at Nottingham University and made available as an open source project on the internet. At this time PsychoPy was simply a library (Python package) that could be imported from Python scripts. Installing was rather painful (because of the dependencies).
- 2006: An editor was added to the interface, so that users could use PsychoPy as an 'application' rather than a library
- April 2009: Version 1.0 released, including all main features of the library (but with some bugs in the win32 installer)
- Sept 2009: Version 1.5 released, including various bug fixes to the underlying library and preview of new GUI interface, to become PsychoPy2. This new interface, the Builder view, will allow users to generate a very wide range of experiments without a knowledge of programming.
[edit] External links
[edit] Key people
[edit] References
- ^ Peirce, J.W. (2007). PsychoPy - psychophysics software in Python. Journal of Neuroscience Methods 162:8-1
- ^ Peirce, J.W. (2008). Generating stimuli for neuroscience using PsychoPy. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, 2: 10
[edit] See also
