#psychopy

Me: Come baby I know you can... Take one more... One more for Daddy

Me *forces one more loop*

During my internship in the Obesity research unit almost everyday I learn new things, sometimes I also research on my own procedures from the project Satin that may have grabed my attention. 

In today’s post I will present a software, called PsychoPy that I found interesting. 

Psychopy is a research and learning tool. It is an attempt to provide a usable psychological presentation suite for experiments developed by non-expert programmers.

PsychoPy is an open-source application to allow the presentation of stimuli and collection of data for a wide range of neuroscience, psychology and psychophysics experiments. It’s a free, powerful alternative to Presentation™ or e-Prime™, written in Python (a free alternative to Matlab™ ).  

It is used by many labs worldwide for psychophysics, cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology, namely -  behavioural experiments,  experiments in developmental psychology, psychophysical experiments .

Sourse: http://psychopy.org/

Satin project uses it for the Consumer Benefit paradigm experiment. It is visual probe task experiment for marketing purposes.

The Visual Probe task takes 8-10 minutes to be completed by the participants. They start with welcome screen and instructions. This task is completed 3 times in visit 2, 7 and 14 during the intervention period. Participants are seated in front of a computer in a quiet space with minimal distractions. The experimenter set the task and talk the instructions trough to ensure the participants have understood.

In the first block images are shown on the screen - two at a time and ask the participants to press as fast as possible the keys T and V on the keyboard. T Key is if the participants see small arrow behind the image pointing up, and if points down then they press V Key. When they are done, they press space on the keyboard to continue.

Then they have the Stop Signal Task, where there images of food items shown. Participants use Y and N key from the keyboard. The participants use Y to say that the food image is above the central line and Y to say is below it. In some point the central line get thicker, Stop Signal appear and they have to stop their response to that trial. There is also distracting images, such as household objects, participants should not respond to these items.

Lastly, the target images are changed to the household items. The participants repeat the same procedure as mentioned above by pressing Y if the image appear above the central line and N if appears below. And the distracting images this time are food items. 

Collection of useful PsychoPy video tutorials #Python #PsychoPy #Psychology

PsychoPy, as I have previously written about (e.g., Free and Useful Software and PsychoPy tutorial) is really a great Python tool for creating Psychology experiments. You can Python code by either using  “code view” or import the package in your favourite IDE.  Furthermore, you can use the builder mode and just drag and drop different items and PsychoPy will create a Python Script for you. If…