Generating stimuli for neuroscience using PsychoPy

TLDR

PsychoPy is a Python library that uses OpenGL to generate highly precise visual stimuli on standard personal computers. The paper demonstrates that PsychoPy enables researchers to design a wide range of neuroscience experiments with minimal effort, outlining its extensive toolset and experimental environment. Users write standard Python scripts to create diverse visual and auditory stimuli, generate movies or image sequences, and interface with external hardware for fMRI, EEG, MEG, and other modalities. Scripts are simple and intuitive, allowing rapid development of new experiments and easy comprehension of existing code even with few comments.

Abstract

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.