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Original Research ARTICLE

This article is part of a Research Topic

Generating stimuli for neuroscience using PsychoPy

Nottingham Visual Neuroscience, School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

PsychoPy is a software library written in Python, using OpenGL to generate very precise visual stimuli on standard personal computers. It is designed to allow the construction of as wide a variety of neuroscience experiments as possible, with the least effort. By writing scripts in standard Python syntax users can generate an enormous variety of visual and auditory stimuli and can interact with a wide range of external hardware (enabling its use in fMRI, EEG, MEG etc.). The structure of scripts is simple and intuitive. As a result, new experiments can be written very quickly, and trying to understand a previously written script is easy, even with minimal code comments. PsychoPy can also generate movies and image sequences to be used in demos or simulated neuroscience experiments. This paper describes the range of tools and stimuli that it provides and the environment in which experiments are conducted.

Keywords:

Python, psychophysics, software, neuroscience, vision, fMRI, EEG, MEG

Citation:

Peirce JW (2009). Generating stimuli for neuroscience using PsychoPy. Front. Neuroinform. 2:10. doi: 10.3389/neuro.11.010.2008

Received:

09 September 2008;

Paper pending published:

27 October 2008;

Accepted:

19 December 2008;

Published online:

15 January 2009.

Edited by:

Rolf Kötter, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Reviewed by:

Andrew D. Straw, California Institute of Technology, USA
Peter Tass, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany

© 2009 Peirce. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence:

Jonathan Peirce, School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK. e-mail: jon@peirce.org.uk