Building Experiments in PsychoPy
- Jonathan Peirce - University of Nottingham, United Kingdom (also i-Reviews Editor)
- Michael MacAskill
PsychoPy is an open-source (free) software package for creating rich, dynamic experiments
Divided into three parts and with unique learning features to guide readers at whatever level they are at, this textbook is suitable for teaching practical undergraduate classes on research methods, or as a reference text for the professional scientist.
The book is written by Jonathan Peirce, the original creator of PsychoPy and Michael MacAskill who have utilised their breadth of experience in Python development to educate students and researchers in this intuitive, yet powerful, experiment generation package.
Supplements
This book offers a great start into building your own experiments. The examples and hands-on exercises (with increasing difficulty) facilitate the learning process and the book furthermore offers an outlook and tips on more complicated topics. So it’s not only useful for the first programming steps but also in later stages of experimental design. The book is continuously written for novices in programming, which makes the start of programming less frustrating. I also like the additional tips on how to calibrate the hardware/equipment so that an optimal communication between software and hardware is obtained.
Excellent book. Within the course, there are four specializations (one for experimental design). I will use it within that specialization.
This is an outstanding book in that it introduces PsychoPy in a way that is comprehensible and accessible to students (and professionals) who do not have previous programming experience. It provides a structure that a student could follow, and it uses examples (Stroop task, personality construct measurement) that are simple and should be known by all students reaching the point where they take an experimental project-based course. Despite the wealth of information and tutorials available online for free, for an instructor, assigning chapters in a textbook in a stepwise fashion is still one of the most reliable ways of ensuring that the students follow a pedagogical plan and do not get distracted or drowned in a sea of what for many, especially in humanistic education programs, is outright scary material (programming).
Outstanding!
For those that are interested in an open source solution for building experiments, this book is a 'must have'. Very comprehensive in its content, this book provides a good starting point for beginners.
I can recommend this book to all students and professionals in the field of experimental psychology. Next to the book you will receive links on additional material to start working.
This book is a esential reading for anyone wanting to use open-source software for experimental design in Psychology. It's written in a very comprehensive and readable style and includes step-by-step guides for designing real experiments for both beginners and professionals. If it would have been published years ago, I would have designed my experiments in PsychoPy! Highly recommended.
This is a great book giving students an easy way to self program experiments. And even for me as a trained user of psychopy it offered some new interesting information. Great book, great program!
It's a great book written in a great cause. In my opinion, students hate generating tasks in complex and unfriendly software packages - and need a great deal of workshop time and support in order to be able to do so. PsychoPy is the easiest package I have come across, and this book is a great - and approachable - introduction. It is the book I would have written if I had known anything about PsychoPy! (And I didn't). But with it, I have taken my own first steps to binning those horrible software packages of yesterday. Valuable for me, invaluable for those students needing to write their own computer tasks, and invaluable (again) for project supervisors with time to save.