PsychoPy with Jonathan Peirce

Summary We’re delving into the complex workings of your mind this week on Podcast.init with Jonathan Peirce. He tells us about how he started the PsychoPy project and how it has grown in utility and popularity over the years. We discussed the ways that it has been put to use in myriad psychological experiments, the inner workings of how to design and execute those experiments, and what is in store for its future. Brief Introduction Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great. I would like to thank everyone who has donated to the show. Your contributions help us make the show sustainable. Hired is sponsoring us this week. If you’re looking for a job as a developer or designer then Hired will bring the opportunities to you. Sign up at hired.com/podcastinit to double your signing bonus. Once you land a job you can check out our other sponsor Linode for running your awesome new Python apps. Check them out at linode.com/podcastinit and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for your next project You want to make sure your apps are error-free so give our last sponsor, Rollbar, a look. Rollbar is a service for tracking and aggregating your application errors so that you can find and fix the bugs in your application before your users notice they exist. Use the link rollbar.com/podcastinit to get 90 days and 300,000 errors for free on their bootstrap plan. Visit our site to subscribe to our show, sign up for our newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. By leaving a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music it becomes easier for other people to find us. Join our community! Visit discourse.pythonpodcast.com to help us grow and connect our wonderful audience. Your hosts as usual are Tobias Macey and Chris Patti Today we’re interviewing Jonathan Peirce about PsychoPy, an open source application for the presentation and collection of stimuli for psychological experimentation Interview with Jonathan Peirce Introductions How did you get introduced to Python? – Chris Can you start by telling us what PsychoPy is and how the project got started? – Tobias How does PsychoPy compare feature wise against some of the proprietary alternatives? – Chris In the documentation you mention that this project is useful for the fields of psychophysics, cognitive neuroscience and experimental psychology. Can you provide some insight into how those disciplines differ and what constitutes an experiment? – Tobias Do you find that your users who have no previous formal programming training come up to speed with PsychoPy quickly? What are some of the challenges there? -Chris Can you describe the internal architecture of PsychoPy and how you approached the design? – Tobias How easy is it to extend PsychoPy with new types of stimulus? – Chris What are some interesting challenges you faced when implementing PsychoPy? – Chris I noticed that you support a number of output data formats, including pickle. What are some of the most popular analysis tools for users of PsychoPy? – Tobias Have you investigated the use of the new Feather library? – Tobias How is data input typically managed? Does PsychoPy support automated readings from test equipment or is that the responsibility of those conducting the experiment? – Tobias What are some of the most interesting experiments that you are aware of having been conducted using PsychoPy? – Chris While reading the docs I found the page describing the integration with the OSF (Open Science Framework) for sharing and validating an experiment and the collected data with other members of the field. Can you explain why that is beneficial to the researchers and compare it with other options such as GitHub for use within the sciences? – Tobias Do you have a roadmap of features that you would like to add to PsychoPy or is it largely driven by contributions from practitioners who are extending it to suit their needs? – Tobias Keep In Touch PsychoPy Discourse Forum Picks Tobias Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy Chris Castro 2 Jon Discourse Links Feather Pyglet HDF5 Open Science Framework The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA