Tutorials

The tutorials provide step-by-step introductions to the various components of Psykinematix so you become familiar with them in no time! In particular, you will learn how to:

- install and setup Psykinematix
- calibrate your experimental setup
- manage the subjects, groups, and sessions
- build and run experiments
- import, plot, fit, and export data

We recommend to follow the lessons in the above order. However as Psykinematix creates a default calibration configuration and provides a Test mode, you may want to skip the calibration and management tutorials for the moment if you wish to build and test experiments right now. You would have to go through the management tutorial nevertheless if you wish to save the results on disk since at least 1 subject and 1 group need to be added before running any experiment in Data Collection mode.

Most lessons take less than 30 minutes to complete. The longest ones, the "Calibration" tutorial and "Lessons 1", may take 30 minutes to 1 hour.

You may download and print the PDF versions. More tutorials will be added over time, please check regularly the Online Documentation.

Install, setup & start learning Psykinematix

Calibrate your experimental setup

You should not underestimate the importance of properly calibrating your experimental setup: publishing data obtained on an uncalibrated system makes your results fruitless from a scientific point of view, and even worse can be misleading to others! Although this is the most technical and longest tutorial, it actually takes only a few minutes to perform the whole calibration of your setup once you master the process.

Manage subjects, groups, and sessions

In addition of keeping a list of subjects and groups, Psykinematix keeps track of the sessions through the "Subjects Panel".

Build and run experiments

We use a few standard psychophysical paradigms as basic examples to learn how to build experiments using Psykinematix. We start with their most basic implementations, and then elaborate from there. After completing these few tutorials, you will be able to create many other new or standard psychophysical experiments with Psykinematix!

Visual Acuity Task
1. Lesson 1: Basic task (Staircase, Letter Discrimination)
2. Lesson 2: Effect of crowding bars (Timeline, Shape Stimulus)

Contrast Sensitivity Task
1. Lesson 1: Basic task (Staircase, Orientation Discrimination)
2. Lesson 2: Effect of spatial frequency (Conditions Design)

Orientation Discrimination Task
1. Lesson 1: Basic task (Staircase, 2AFC)
2. Lesson 2: Effect of size and spatial frequency (Conditions Design)
3. Lesson 3: Temporal masking (ISI Timeline)
4. Lesson 4: Spatial and temporal contextual effects (SOA in Timeline, Transparency Blending)
5. Lesson 5: 1st-order drifting stimulus (Time-Varying Parameters, Dynamic Composing)

Advanced Stimuli (check the Online Documentation for regular update)
1. Filtered Noise (Custom Stimulus)
2. Field of Drifting Gabors (Dynamic Multi-Element Stimulus)
3. Retinotopic Mapping Stimuli (Time-varying parameters, I/O)

Import, plot, fit, and export data

The "Plotter" panel offers plotting and fitting capabilities for either the most recent or older sessions data.