Neuroscience programming with psychopy/python: Line Bisection Task (Video 7) - Final Program

In this series of videos we will be using Psychopy and Python (version 3) to create the line bisection task. If you would like to know how to go about creating and designing a working Neuroscience experiment using Python programming language, then this is a nice and gentle introduction.

The line-bisection task can be used to probe visual-spatial attention / visual neglect in people with impaired parietal lobe function. More specifically, in this task we present our subjects with a transected line and ask them to decide if the left (or the right) side of the line is longer or shorter. In some of the trials, we will present a line that is perfectly bisected (so left and right are the same). We will base our experiment off a previous paper (Kim et al., 2005 Neuroscience Letters) and build a working program from scratch.

In this particular video we will program a second loop (nested loop) to allow all four experimental blocks to be completed automatically. We will also include automatic instructions to the subject at the end of each block. Finally, we also shuffle our numpy.shuffle command into the outer loop so that each block of trials is randomised. The output of our program remains a *.csv file but will now contain all 160 trials of our experiment. You will now need to think about how to analyse the data.

All of the code is written on the screen at a speed that should be easy to reproduce. All programs are open-source and all you will need is a working Python3 installation and working Psychopy Installation.

Software Used
Python 3 : www.python.org
PsychoPy: www.psychopy.org
Atom Text Editor: atom.io

This video series was programmed on a MacBook Air (8GB ram, i5 core).