chainsaw

Cause every psycho(py) needs a chainsaw

Set of tools for PsychoPy. Contains an experiment class that easies things up and a bunch of useful functions.

Some of the things that chainsaw helps with:

• reading settings from settings.yaml file
• showing instructions built from images or text files, where some of the pages are python functions (allows to show actual trial examples as part of the instructions)
• showing breaks every n trials
• function to show a forced break - that has to last at least N seconds - with a nice timer.
• presenting stimuli with simple commands. For example exp.show_element('fix', trigger=100) (where exp is an instance of the Experiment class) automatically checks stimuli dictionary for 'fix' key (exp.stim dictionary created by the user at the experiment start), draws time for 'fix' defined in the settings.yaml (converting the time to number of frames) and fires a trigger synced with screen refresh using the device defined in settings.yaml (LPT port or CPOD Cedrus device).
• training that continues conditional on participant correctness
• fitting stimuli intensity with a staircase or the quest plus method
• sending triggers through LPT or C-pod device
• simple interface to gather responses from Cedrus response box (getKeys and waitKeys just like when using keyboard in psychopy)
• CedrusResponseBox object that mimics psychopy.hardware.keyboard.Keyboard and returns set of psychopy keys objects.
• saving triggers to a .log file (helps testing triggers without LPT port, Cedrus C-POD or in general without the recording device)

The two core elements of experiment built with chainsaw are the experiment object (subclassed from chainsaw.exp_utils.Experiment) and the settings.yaml file.
🚧 more description and examples will arrive later 🚧