Today I met Jon Peirce, who is responsible for much - if not all - of the code in PsychoPy, which is a nice open-source package for creating visual stimuli and running psychophysical (or should I say PychoPysical?) experiments in Python. There's a number of reasons as to why psychopy is interesting for neuroscientists:
- It's based on free libraries
- It is platform independent
- Python is a nice OO language
- Did I mention it's free?
- It works great with OpenGL
I believe that software should be freely available and psychopy is exactly that; that means that you will not have to pay for Matlab licenses to use the PsychToolbox. Although a wonderful piece of software in its own right, the PsychToolbox requires researchers to have a license for Matlab, which can make it quite expensive. Furthermore, coding (or should I say: scripting) an experiment in Matlab can be somewhat "ugly" in my opinion. As far as I can tell, it's early days for PsychoPy, Jon told me there are about a 100 users at the moment. Hopefully more researchers will find their way to PsychoPy and hopefully some of them will be able to help expand it!
(ofcourse there are a couple of down sides of using PsychoPy; (1) installation of Python is not always straightforward, but see the .dmg for the mac which features everything you need to run PsychoPy; and (2) if you don't know the language you would have to learn it)