psychopy_ext 0.5.3

A framework for a rapid reproducible design, analysis and plotting of experiments in neuroscience and psychology.

Please refer to the online documentation for a more in depth explanation how to use the package.

What is it?

psychopy_ext is a framework for a rapid design, analysis and plotting of experiments in neuroscience and psychology.

Unlike PsychoPy, PyMVPA or matplotlib that are very flexible and support multiple options to suit everyone’s needs, the underlying philosophy of psychopy_ext is to act as the glue at a higher level of operation by choosing reasonable defaults for these packages and providing patterns for common tasks with a minimal user intervention.

Features

• Easy to run and rerun everything

• Neat project organization

• Templates for building and analyzing experiments (behavioral & fMRI)

• Simplified descriptive statistics

• Pretty plotting

• Automatic running (unit testing) of experiments

• Automatic GUI and command-line interpreter

• Custom needs? Inherit & customize: everything is a class!

• Built-in simple models of vision (Pixel-wise difference, GaborJet, and HMAX’99)

Installation

pip install psychopy_ext

(no success?)

Quick start

First, find demo files in site-packages (where is it?). Copy them to your home folder or another location of your choice (but where you have write permission). Now check the demos:

• For people who use a keyboard:

  • In a terminal, navigate to the demos folder

  • Type python run.py main exp run. Do the experiment!

  • Type python run.py main analysis run to see how well you did.

• For people who use PsychoPy app:

  • In coder view, open run.py file from the demos folder

  • Click the green running man to run it.

  • Click on the run button. Do the experiment!

  • When done, choose the analysis tab and click on run to see how well you did.

• For people who use a mouse on Windows:

  • In a file browser, navigate to the demos folder

  • Double-click click on run.bat

  • Click on the run button. Do the experiment!

  • When done, choose the analysis tab, and click on run to see how well you did.

When done with the demo, inspect main.py file to see how it works, and build your experiment using this template, or try more demos.

Current state of affairs

psychopy_ext is currently stable, meaning that I use it myself daily but there are some limitations:

• fMRI analyses (fmri module) have not been thoroughly tested yet (no unit tests) but has been used extensively in my own research.

• plots work well but might still require fine tuning and may be unable to handle missing values etc.

Future roadmap (a wishlist):

• README generation with the most common commands

• Automatic summary of typical commands for CLI

• More robust command-line operation

• Browser-based project management tool

• info and rp should become classes with tips, lists etc

• Full fMRI preprocessing support (maybe)

• Generate full papers via Open Science Paper and PythonTeX

• Force metadata by turning exp_plan into a class

• Integrated Bayesian statistics

Dependencies

Required

• Python 2.6+ (but tested only with 2.7)

• PsychoPy 1.79.01+

• pandas 0.12+

• docutils (technically it is not mandatory but it will allow rendering docstrings on screen by the exp class)

• svgwrite (it’s used to export stimuli to SVG format, so it’s also not super mandatory but given its pip-installable, why not?)

Optional

• seaborn 0.3+ (pretty plots, highly recommended)

• PyMVPA 2.3+ (required for the fmri class; Windows version for Python 2.7 here)

• NiBabel (required for the fmri class; install with pip install nibabel)

License

Copyright 2010-2014 Jonas Kubilius (http://klab.lt)

Laboratories of Biological and Experimental Psychology, KU Leuven (Belgium)

GNU General Public License v3 or later

Included external packages and functions (covered by a compatible license): combinations, combinations_with_replacement, OrderedDict, HMAX, GaborJet