PsychoPy
>40k users >4k citations >190 github contributors >150 pavlovia licences
Easy enough for teaching Precise enough for psychophysics Flexible enough for everything else Online or lab-based, your choice
News

Did you know PsychoPy is supported by our company, Open Science Tools? find out more here.

https://opensciencetools.org/
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Come say hi in Washington! We will have a booth at APS - May 22nd - 25th 2025

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/conventions/2025-aps-annual-convention
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PsychoPy is part of a Summer School in Padova! - June 30th - July 4th 2025

https://arcasummerschool.dpss.psy.unipd.it/arcasummerschool/
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Two day PsychoPy satelite event at ESCOP, Sheffield - September 1st and 2nd 2025

https://www.escop2025.com/satellite-events
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NEW EDITION of the official book, with new chapter on running online: Building Experiments in PsychoPy Ed2

https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/building-experiments-in-psychopy/book273700
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Is your software timing as good as PsychoPy®? See detailed comparisons with other software in our timing mega-study

https://peerj.com/articles/9414/
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Please try to cite the most up-to-date paper: Peirce, Gray, Simpson et al (2019)

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2Fs13428-018-01193-y
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Lots of helpful tutorials on youtube! Click here to see

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFB5A1BE51964D587

Home

What users say

How is PsychoPy Free?

The PsychoPy desktop application is free to download and run for in-lab studies. PsychoPy® was written by scientists for scientists, the code underlying the software is open source on GitHub, so even if you want to change the software you can!

As PsychoPy grew in popularity, it became clear that developing it “as a side project” in researchers spare time was not going to be sustainable. We now have a company, Open Science Tools, to sustain professional development. We have three main sources of revenue:

  • Pavlovia.org licenses: A platform for hosting your study online if you want to collect data via a URL link.

  • Consultancy: Yes, you can pay us to make your task for you!

  • Workshops: We can run custom training workshops for your department/team.

So, if you enjoy PsychoPy and would like to support its maintenance, please consider supporting us through one of these revenue streams. We try to keep our rates low-cost and affordable, whilst generating enough revenue to have a team of staff professionally develop PsychoPy and support users.

Easy enough for teaching

Universities all over the world are using PsychoPy® for teaching students about experiments

  • Flexible and intuitive Builder interface to create huge range of studies

  • Textbook(s) suitable for both undergraduate and professional audiences

  • Many further resources for learning and teaching, including Youtube tutorials, online tutorials and workshops.

  • The Pavlovia repository of shared experiments accessible directly from the application (requires PsychoPy®) to search for and share your studies.

Precise enough for psychophysics

Hardware accelerated graphics, best-in class timing, and calibration tools built-in

  • Fantastic timing precision (see the timing mega-study for comparisons)!

  • Time and update your stimulus on every screen refresh!

  • Tools to help monitor calibration and wide range of units

  • Hardware-accelerated graphics for stimuli that can be updated on the fly

  • Access to button boxes when you need the utmost precision

  • Automated logging for you to what happened and when

  • OpenGL (and shaders) ready for use when you low-level access to graphics

Flexible enough for everything else

PsychoPy® is great for:

  • Dynamic, interactive studies: Free yourself from simple static stimuli! You can update your stimulus interactively on every screen refresh!

  • Neuroimaging: Send and receive triggers to your hardware at precise times

  • Eye-tracking: Access to wide range of hardware (eye trackers, button boxes, trigger systems…)

Online

Want to run your study on the web, so participants can access it anywhere?

Did you know PsychoPy® has a JavaScript sister library? PsychoJS, this means you can create a version of your experiment to run in a browser, after that you can use Pavlovia.org to host it!

Pavlovia is:

  • A secure server to host your experiment online.

  • An Open Access library of experiment demos.

  • A place to create feature rich surveys using Pavlovia Surveys

  • Upload that to Pavlovia.org (with easy tools built into the PsychoPy app)

  • Give participants your URL and run your study in the browser!

  • You can recruit participants using Sona, Prolific, Mechanical Turk or similar systems.


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