#Psychopy response box code#

I’m happy to report it’s generally worked out pretty well. Since PsychoPy is a) entirely free, b) cross-platform (meaning it should work on any OS), and c) something I’d been meaning to look at seriously for a while anyway, it seemed like a good idea to try it out. Somewhat counterintuitively therefore, I decided that the easiest thing to do was start from scratch and re-create the experiment using something else entirely.

#Psychopy response box code#

I could foresee getting this Matlab code working well on every single students’ laptop would be fraught with issues – some of them might be using OS X, and some might be using various versions of Windows – this is definitely going to cause problems.* Either the timing goes to hell, or a different version of Matlab/Psychtoolbox is needed, or (in the worst cases) the program just crashes and needs debugging all over again. Secondly, in my (admittedly, limited) experience with Matlab and Psychtoolbox, I’ve always found it to be a little… sensitive. What I mean is that whenever I’ve tried to transfer a (working) program onto another computer, I’ve generally run into trouble. However, using this version seemed impractical for a number of reasons firstly Matlab licences are expensive and getting a licenced version of Matlab on every student’s computer would have blown the budget available. I was actually given a version of the experiment programmed (by someone else) in Matlab using the Psychtoolbox system.

The task is based on a recent paper ( Rezlescu et al., 2012) in PLoS One, and involves presenting face stimuli that vary in facial characteristics associated with trustworthiness, in a ‘game’ where the participant plays the role of an investor and has to decide how much money they would invest in each person’s business. I’ve recently been tasked with an interesting problem I need an experimental task for a bunch of undergrads to use in a ‘field study’ – something that they can run on their personal laptops, and test people in naturalistic environments (i.e. I wrote a tiny post about PsychoPy a little while ago and it’s something I’ve been meaning to come back to since then.