I’m looking forward to seeing you guys on Monday! This course is intended to be very much hands-on-learning-by-doing. I’ll try to prepare small exercises for each topic that we’ll cover. On the last day, you’ll get some time for free-play or to work with your own experiments.

Here’s the initial workshop description/flyer.

Some of the scripts that we’ll work with depends on a small helper-module I wrote called ppc (short for PsychoPy Course). Get ppc.py and put it in the same folder as the other scripts.

To prepare for the workshop, please follow the Getting Started and make sure that everything is running. You may also want to peek through the Python basics in advance. This will be our subject for the first day.

Monday: python basics and graphical interfaces

This day is just bits and pieces.

• 9 – 10: Welcome
  Setting everything up and a few words on why PsychoPy is great!
• 10.15 – 12: Python basic
  We’ll go through the basics of python programming relevant for coding PsychoPy experiments. This is particularly relevant for day 2 and 3. This script is my preliminary plan. You might want to familiarize yourself with it in advance if you’re new to programming in general. Otherwise you’ll be lost on day 2 and 3 🙂
  Script: Python basics for psychopy.
• 13 – 16: Graphical interfaces
  Though this course is about getting full control through scripting, it’s also about promoting free and open source stimulus delivery software. We’ll take a peek at OpenSesame and PsychoPy Builder which are great for students or more casual experiments.
  Stroop experiment (zip) that we’re going to make using PsychoPy Builder.
  Stroop experiment that we’re going to make using OpenSesame.

Tuesday: stimulus precision

This day is all about precision in timing and precision in appearance. In essence, this is a pitfall-prevention day and there’s quite a few pitfalls that too many experimenters are unaware of! We’ll just stick to presenting basic stimuli without embedding them in a full experiment.

• 9 – 12: Stimulus types and visual precision
  We’ll look at the different stimulus types that PsychoPy ships with and how to present them reliably across computers and operating systems.
• 13 – 16: Temporal precision and synchronizing events
  We’ll look at how to identify bottlenecks in the script and how to prevent them. This includes timing visual stimuli to monitor updates and synchronizing visual stimuli, auditive stimuli and triggers to/from fMRI, M/EEG etc.
  Info: timing in experiments.
  Script: Timing code snippets.
  Script: Good practice for timing visual stimuli.

Wednesday: coding an experiment

This day presents tips and ideas about how build an experiment around your stimulus presentations. It’s about trials, blocks, collecting responses, saving data and staircases.

• 9 – 11: A template for scripted PsychoPy experiments
  I’ll present the way that I write up experiments, which at least simplifies matters for me. You’ll get some small code snippets that serve as a good starting point when you’re writing up new experiment.
  Script: Ways to handle trials.
  Script: PsychoPy experiment template.
• 11 +: Workshop / free play
  You are free to build your own experiment or just fool around with stimuli/timing, drawing on what you’ve learned during this course.