Coder

The coder view is designed for those wishing to make scripts from scratch, either to make their experiments or do other things. Coder view does not teach you about Python per se, and you are recommended also to learn about that (Python has many excellent tutorials for programmers and non-programmers alike). In particular, dictionaries, lists and numpy arrays are used a great deal in most PsychoPy^® experiments.

You can program PsychoPy^® experiments in any python development environment (e.g. PyCharm, Spyder would be excellent examples of full-featured editors). So, why use Coder view in PsychoPy? The answer is that the PsychoPy as a standalone package also includes several common python libraries you would use when making experiments in python. In general there will therefore be fewer steps to take to configure your python environment in coder. So if you are teaching python, there should be less work to set up the environment for each student! However if you are teaching python for many purposes beyond making experiments, you might want to move to another IDE (Integrated Development Environment), because PsychoPy^® coder won’t have everything you need imported.

You can learn to use the scripting interface to PsychoPy^® in several ways, and you should probably follow a combination of them:

• Check the content of our PsychoPy workshops (we currently focus on coding concepts on day 3).

• Basic Concepts: some of the logic of PsychoPy^® scripting

• Tutorials: walk you through the development of some semi-complete experiments

• demos: in the demos menu of Coder view.

• use the Builder to compile a script and see how it works (you can actually compile to Python or Javascript to learn a bit of both!). This is also useful for understanding the Code Component, you can write a snippet in a code component in builder and compile to see where it is written in the script (but remember exporting to coder is a one way street, you can’t make edits in coder and hope that is reflected back in the builder experiment).

You should check the Reference Manual (API) for further details and, ultimately, go into PsychoPy and start examining the source code. It’s just regular python!

Basic Concepts

• Presenting Stimuli
  • Stimulus objects
  • Setting stimulus attributes
  • Timing
  • Using autoDraw
• Logging data
  • Log levels and targets
  • Updating the logs
  • AutoLogging
  • Manual methods
  • Using a custom clock for logs
• Handling Trials and Conditions
  • TrialHandler
  • TrialHandlerExt (For oddball paradigms)
  • StairHandler
• Global Event Keys
  • Adding a global event key (simple)
  • Adding a global event key (advanced)
  • Indexing
  • Number of active event keys
  • Removing global event keys
  • Global shutdown key
  • A working example

PsychoPy^® Tutorials

• Tutorial 1: Generating your first stimulus
  • Know your monitor
  • Your first stimulus
• Tutorial 2: Measuring a JND using a staircase procedure
  • Get info from the user
  • Setup the information for trials
  • Build your stimuli
  • Control the presentation of the stimuli
  • Get input from the subject
  • Output your data and clean up
• Tutorial 3: Analysing data in Python
• Draw a rotating face
• Drifting plaid demo

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