Abstract
PsychoPy is a very popular tool among psychologists. It can be installed as a Python module, but you can also use it as a standalone application that features a graphical user interface. PsychoPy offers a set of convenient functions for generating visual stimuli, registering keyboard and mouse events, and interfacing with research equipment. This chapter will first give an overview of the essential PsychoPy features that are frequently used for building experiments, most notably the various visual stimuli one can generate with PsychoPy and keyboard and mouse events handling. At the end of this chapter, we put together the building blocks of PsychoPy to create a simple script to illustrate the famous Simon effect.
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Notes
- 1.
Modern video graphics cards all support hardware double buffering. At any time, the contents in the front buffer are actively being displayed on the screen, while the back buffer is being drawn. When the drawing is complete in the back buffer, the two buffers can be switched (flipped) so the back buffer becomes the front buffer and its content is shown on screen, usually in sync with the monitor vertical blanking signal.
- 2.
- 3.
PsychoPy allows users to instantiate multiple clocks to keep track of time for different purposes, e.g., a global clock to keep track of the amount of time elapsed since task onset and another clock to calculate response time on each trial.
Reference
C.H. Lu, R.W. Proctor, The influence of irrelevant location information on performance—A review of the Simon and spatial Stroop effects. Psychon. Bull. Rev. 2(2), 174–207 (1995)
Peirce, J., Gray, J. R., Simpson, S., MacAskill, M., Höchenberger, R., Sogo, H., Kastman, E., et al. (2019). PsychoPy2: Experiments in behavior made easy. Behavior Research Methods, 51(1), 195–203. doi:10.3758/s13428-018-01193-y
Peirce, J., & MacAskill, M. (2018). Building Experiments in PsychoPy. SAGE
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Wang, Z. (2021). Building Experiments with PsychoPy. In: Eye-Tracking with Python and Pylink. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82635-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82635-2_2
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