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Welcome to the PsyScope X Info Page | ||||
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PsyScope is a program to design and run psychological experiments, used by many experimental labs It runs on Apple Macintosh computers. It has been developed at Carnegie Mellon by Jonathan Cohen, Matthew Flatt, Brian MacWhinney and Jefferson Provost for Mac OS 9 in the '90s. Thanks to its creators, its code has been made public, under the GNU GPL license. It has been ported to OS X by the SISSA Language, Cognition and Development Lab, thanks to a collective effort to which several labs kindly contributed.
The current version of PsyScope X is an universal program. It runs natively on Intel processors, where it runs I would say pretty well, as well as on on PowerPc machines, where it runs I would say reasonably well -- anyhow, better than most of the other commercial programs I know of. Furthermore, Psyscope X can allow you to have a control on several kinds of stimuli (movies, sounds) that other commercial programs running on other platforms cannot give you.
Documentation is available on this page, if you have the patience to look for it (sorry, I am not strong in html, nor in organizing things). There is also a user list, to which you can subscribe, or where you can consult an archive for problems or issues.
You can download the latest public version here.
I am happy to announce that the Regione Friuli-Venezia-Giulia awarded our Lab a grant to develop the code. The grant is a one-year project renewable up to 3 years, upon successful completion of the milestones we set as targets. The grant should be enough to pay 3 to 4 programmers.
Thanks to this support, we decided to give a try to a rather ambitious project. Our main aim now is to provide a reasonably stable version of PsyScope X for the next 3 years, but especially, to rewrite the code entirely, creating a brand new version of the program. I would like this new version to be a state-of-the art program that, hopefully, will satisfy labs' needs for the next 10 years or so, pretty much like the old PsyScope did.
Provisionally, the new project is called PsyScope XL, for PsyScope X running on Leopard (no previous systems will be supported), but also for PsyScope Extra Large, which describes our current ambitions. We hope to write the best code available, to release as a GPL project. My hope is that, once the project starts, people in the community will pick it up and start adding their own contributions, as in any healthy open source project.
We opened a Wiki page which is for the moment a repository of thoughts about the program, and a way to check its progress.
The page is very provisional, but you are welcome to take a look at it. If think you ARE SERIOUSLY MOTIVATED IN FOLLOWING THE PROJECT and can provide insights from the scientists point of view, or are technically savvy and want to give us good tips and suggestions during the course of the project, LET ME KNOW. Several issues are being decided now, but the project is still open to modifications and ideas which I hope we will be able to realize.
Most likely, PsyScope XL will be quite a different program from PsyScope X, for technical considerations tied to the Cocoa environment and the programming tools available under Os X. But I hope everybody will find him/herself at ease with it, and so ideas and contributions are most welcome, with no promise that they will be implemented :-)
Finally, let me make sure I pound this in your head: Because the possibility to obtain the renewal of the grant also depends on our ability to involve other people in the project, if your lab can contribute to our effort in either funds or programming time, please So LET ME KNOW..
Our programmers are the excellent Luca Filippin, who did a lot of work on many part of the code (movies, sound, USB Button box, EGI extension, Eye Tracker extension, text, general improvements), and the excellent group at DataMind, which did many things on the old code and is developing a great deal of the new project. Every independent programmer or lab willing to to contribute and pick up some programming task is warmly welcome!
(August 08) PsyScope X Build 53 is available. This version has been compiled with Xcode 3 and tested mostly on Leopard. It should work on Tiger as well just fine, but there may be differences. We do not support Panther any longer. You can download the program by clicking here. You can go directly to download, but you can also indicate whether you want to be kept informed about further developments of our project, whether you volunteer for beta testing further versions, or, if you feel inclined and able to do so, whether you want to contribute with some programming time to the project. Make sure you read the doc for the new features (mainly contained in the Docs & Tips section) and check the scripts exemplifying them (mostly contained in the Other Stuff section).
You can also download the code, in the form of a Xcode 3 project, by using Svn (which is installed by default under Leopard). The code should compile under Leopard and Tiger. Follow these directions to download and compile.
Due to not so popular request but still request, I am also making some old builds available. By clicking on the links, you can download Build 41, Build 45, Build 46, and Build 51.
BETA TESTERS: You find a version of the program to be tested here.
Build 53 finesses the replacement of the drawing engine from the old QuickDraw to CoreVideo, introduced in build 51. The advantage should be a much greater reliability for visual stimuli sent in fast succession. We tested PsyScope X with a MacBook Pro with an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz CPU and 2 GB of Memory, and an external CRT screen displaying the stimuli. At a refresh rate of 100 hz, the program displayed a different picture at every screen refresh. With other configurations we could not obtain this precision. So if visual stimulus duration is crucial for you, you are advised to try with the latest processor you can put your hands on.
Besides this major change, in Build 53 many bugs have been fixed. A new module handling TCP/IP communication has been added, so that you will now be able to run interactive experiments with several computers running PsyScope X. Documentation will be added shortly. Other commands for movies and the mouse have been added. The possibility to use international keyboards and character has been greatly extended. The expression parser has been modified and should be more liberal and reliable (notes about how the expression parser works are contained in this pdf document). The Egi Netstation module (for experiments with ERPs) has been greatly improved. Scores of documented and undocumented bugs have been closed.
Starting from Build 46, we entirely rewrote the code for the USB Button Box, as the code delivered by our previous programming company (Robosoft) ended up to be too poor to be usable. The Bbox Info page contains information on this part of the project. Please make sure that you have at least Build 46 if you want to use the USB Button Box. A software manual is also available, for download, in the BBox info page.
With PsyScope X you should be able to do everything you did with PsyScope Os 9, but remember that the program still has bugs.
PsyScope X has several features that are not present in PsyScope 9. You will find the doc for the new features in the Docs & Tips section. Please read it with care if you plan to use those new features. Then, ask questions if you don't find an answer. Remember that there is an active users list where people might answer your queries.
While preparing the code for the OS X porting, we have also prepared a version of PsyScope that can be compiled with Codewarrior 8. It runs under Mac Os 9.2.2 and has not been tested on previous systems. Download it here. You can also download the project CW8 sources here (16MB). If you stick to Mac Os 9 and need to modify the program, then this is probably the code version you want to work on. In case you did it, and modified the code for good reasons, please let me know.
Thank you for your visit. For any further info, send me a message.
Luca Bonatti
International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS)
Trieste, Italy
