PSYCHOLOGY: RESEARCH : PHYSICS : SOFTWARE : COMPUTER : TECHNOLOGY: Psychtoolbox Wiki

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Psychtoolbox Wiki

Psychtoolbox Wiki

<http://psychtoolbox.org/wikka.php?wakka=HomePage>

Table of Contents

News

Overview

System Requirements

Downloading and Installing the Toolbox

Tutorial

Function Reference

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Forum

Flavors and Versions

Platform Differences and Writing Portable Code

Bugs

Feature Requests

Hardware Support

C Source Code for the Psychtoolbox MEX Files

Useful Links

History, Credits, License, and Citing Your Use of the Toolbox

Contribute to this Wiki (and the PTB Software)

User Contributed Software

Old Wiki

Old PTB-2 (OS 9 and Win) Psychtoolbox Website

Psychophysics Toolbox Version 3 (PTB-3) is a free set of Matlab functions

for vision research. It makes it easy to synthesize and show accurately

controlled visual stimuli and interact with the observer. It has at least

seven thousand active users (see Overview), an active forum, and is highly

cited. PTB-3 is based on the Psychophysics Toolbox Version 2 (PTB-2) but

its Matlab extensions (in C) were rewritten to be more modular and use

OpenGL. This Wiki describes the current version (PTB-3), which runs with

Matlab 7.x on Mac OSX, Linux and Windows (see System Requirements). The

old PTB-2, for Mac OS 9 and Windows, still used in many labs, remains

available but is no longer developed or supported.

Overview

<http://psychtoolbox.org/wikka.php?wakka=PsychtoolboxOverview>

The attraction of using computer displays for visual psychophysics is that

they allow software specification of the stimulus. Programs to run

experiments are often written in a low-level language (e.g. C or Pascal)

to achieve full control of the hardware for precise stimulus display.

Although these low-level languages provide power and flexibility, they are

not conducive to rapid program development. Interpreted languages (e.g.

BASIC, LISP, Mathematica, and Matlab) are abstracted from hardware details

and provide friendlier development environments, but don't provide the

hardware control needed for precise stimulus display. The Psychophysics

Toolbox is a software package that adds this capability to the Matlab

application on Macintosh and Windows computers.

Matlab is a high-level interpreted language with extensive support for

numerical calculations. The Psychophysics Toolbox interfaces between

Matlab and the computer hardware. The Psychtoolbox's core routines provide

access to the display frame buffer and color lookup table, allow

synchronization with the vertical retrace, support millisecond timing,

allow access to OpenGL commands, and facilitate the collection of observer

responses. Ancillary routines support common needs like color space

transformations and the QUEST threshold seeking algorithm.

The Matlab & Psychtoolbox environment is flexible yet relatively easy to

learn. Canned experimental programs fail because they usually can't do a

really new experiment. For that you need the expressive scope of a

full-fledged computer language, such as C or Matlab. Matlab is a

particularly good language for running laboratory experiments. Even for

experienced programmers, three features of Matlab greatly speed the

development cycle over other languages. Matlab has a rich library of

high-level functions available to do math and plotting. It operates on

arrays and images as named variables. And it is interactive, so that one

can type 1+1 and immediately see the answer 2, which is invaluable when

developing laboratory software to run experiments.

Read more at the URL immediately above:

Psychtoolbox-3 Useful Links

<http://psychtoolbox.org/wikka.php?wakka=PsychtoolboxLinks>

Link Categories

Other Software Packages

Visual stimulus presentation software

Toolkits for Psychometric function fitting and other data analysis

Toolkits for controlling special hardware

Interesting Technical Documentation on the Web

Graphics card technology

Databases listing properties and support for different OpenGL extensions

on different graphics hardware

Hardware tests (graphics and other) and technical articles about hardware

Display technology

Timing and timing issues

OS/X

Sincerely,

Dillard

Temple University

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

(215) 204 - 4584

jwne@...

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