OpenSesame
OpenSesame is a tool to create experiments for psychology, neuroscience, and experimental economics.
Copyright, 2010-2026, Sebastiaan Mathôt and contributors.
About
OpenSesame is a graphical experiment builder. OpenSesame provides an easy to use, point-and-click interface for creating psychological/ neuroscientific experiments.
Features
- A user-friendly interface — a modern, professional, and easy-to-use graphical interface
- Online experiments — run your experiment in a browser with OSWeb
- AI — develop your experiments together with SigmundAI
- Python — add the power of Python to your experiment
- JavaScript — add the power of JavaScript to your experiment
- Use your devices — use your eye tracker, button box, EEG equipment, and more.
- Free — released under the GPL3
- Crossplatform — Windows, Mac OS, and Linux
Related repositories
OpenSesame relies on a number repositories that are all hosted by the Cogsci.nl organization on GitHub. The most important of these are:
- opensesame contains core OpenSesame functionality
- sigmund analyst is a code editor that provides various PyQt widgets used by OpenSesame
- opensesame-extension-sigmund integrates SigmundAI into the OpenSesame user interface
- osweb implements OSWeb, the online OpenSesame runtime
- opensesame-extension-osweb embeds OSWeb into the OpenSesame user interface
- datamatrix implements a tabular data structure that is used by the
loopitem - qdatamatrix implements a Qt widget for editing datamatrix objects
- pseudorandom implements pseudorandomization/ randomization constraints
Branches
Each major version of OpenSesame lives in its own branch.
gibson- 2.8heisenberg- 2.9ising- 3.0james- 3.1koffka- 3.2loewenfeld- 3.3milgram- 4.0nightingale- 4.1
Citations
- Mathôt, S., Schreij, D., & Theeuwes, J. (2012). OpenSesame: An open-source, graphical experiment builder for the social sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 44(2), 314-324. doi:10.3758/s13428-011-0168-7
- Mathôt, S., & March, J. (2022). Conducting linguistic experiments online with OpenSesame and OSWeb. Language Learning. doi:10.1111/lang.12509
License
OpenSesame is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License 3. The full license should be included in the file COPYING, or can be obtained from:
OpenSesame contains works of others. For the full license information, please refer to debian/copyright.
Documentation
Installation instructions and documentation are available on the documentation website ...
... which is itself also hosted on GitHub:
Linux installer
The easiest way to install OpenSesame on Linux is to download and run the installer script. This will create a Virtual Environment, pip install OpenSesame and all dependencies into this environment, and add a Desktop file to your system to easily start Sigmund Analyst. To upgrade, simply run the script again.
Currently, the Linux installer is tested on Ubuntu 26.04.
bash <(curl -L https://github.com/open-cogsci/OpenSesame/raw/refs/heads/nightingale/linux-installer.sh) --install
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