psychopy_ext: A Python repository from Foucl

Please refer to the online documentation for a more in depth explanation how to use the package.

What is it?

psychopy_ext is a framework for a rapid design, analysis and plotting of experiments in neuroscience and psychology.

Unlike PsychoPy, PyMVPA or matplotlib that are very flexible and support multiple options to suit everyone's needs, the underlying philosophy of psychopy_ext is to act as the glue at a higher level of operation by choosing reasonable defaults for these packages and providing patterns for common tasks with a minimal user intervention.

Features

Easy to run and rerun everything
Neat project organization
Templates for building and analyzing experiments (behavioral & fMRI)
Simplified descriptive statistics
Pretty plotting
Automatic running (unit testing) of experiments
Automatic GUI and command-line interpreter
Custom needs? Inherit & customize: everything is a class!
Built-in simple models of vision (Pixel-wise difference, GaborJet, and HMAX'99)

Installation

pip install psychopy_ext

(no success?)

Quick start

First, find demo files in site-packages (where is it?). Copy them to your home folder or another location of your choice (but where you have write permission). Now check the demos:

For people who use a keyboard:
- In a terminal, navigate to the demos folder
- Type python run.py main exp run. Do the experiment!
- Type python run.py main analysis run to see how well you did.
For people who use PsychoPy app:
- In coder view, open run.py file from the demos folder
- Click the green running man to run it.
- Click on the run button. Do the experiment!
- When done, choose the analysis tab and click on run to see how well you did.
For people who use a mouse on Windows:
- In a file browser, navigate to the demos folder
- Double-click click on run.bat
- Click on the run button. Do the experiment!
- When done, choose the analysis tab, and click on run to see how well you did.

When done with the demo, inspect main.py file to see how it works, and build your experiment using this template, or try more demos.

Current state of affairs

psychopy_ext is currently stable, meaning that I use it myself daily but there are some limitations:

I no longer actively use fmri module so it is no longer guaranteed to work.
stats and plots work well many functions are undocumented.

Future roadmap (a wishlist):

README generation with the most common commands
Automatic summary of typical commands for CLI
More robust command-line operation
Browser-based project management tool
info and rp should become classes with tips, lists etc
Full fMRI preprocessing support (maybe)
Generate full papers via Open Science Paper and PythonTeX
Force metadata by turning exp_plan into a class
Integrated Bayesian statistics

Dependencies

general
- numpy
- scipy
- pandas 0.17+
exp
- PsychoPy 1.83.04+
- docutils (will allow rendering docstrings on screen by the exp class)
- svgwrite (used to export stimuli to SVG format)
plots
- seaborn 0.7+ (pretty plots; not really mandatory but required for the benefit of your eyes)
models
- `sklearn`_
- `skimage`_
- caffe
- matlab_wrapper (for accessing MATLAB)
fMRI
- PyMVPA 2.3.1+ (Windows version for Python 2.7 here)
- NiBabel (install with pip install nibabel)
- h5py (install with pip install h5py)

License

Brain and Cognition, KU Leuven (Belgium)

McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT (USA)

GNU General Public License v3 or later

Included external packages and functions (covered by a compatible license): combinations, combinations_with_replacement, OrderedDict, HMAX, GaborJet