Psychology experiments enter the post-PC era: OpenSesame now runs on Android

I’ve mentioned OpenSesame briefly on here before, but for those of you who weren’t keeping up, it’s a pretty awesome, free psychology experiment-developing application, built using the Python programming language, and it has a lot in common with PsychoPy (which is also awesome).

The recently-released new version of OpenSesame has just taken an important step, in that it now supports the Android mobile operating system, meaning that it can run natively on Android tablets and smartphones. As far as I’m aware, this is the first time that a psychology-experimental application has been compiled (and released to the masses) for a mobile OS.

This is cool for lots of reasons. It’s an interesting technical achievement; Android is a very different implementation to a desktop OS, being focused heavily on touch interfaces. Such interfaces are now ubiquitous, and are much more accessible, in the sense that people who may struggle with a traditional mouse/keyboard can use them relatively easily. Running psychology experiments on touch-tablets may enable the study of populations (e.g., the very young, very old, or various patient groups) that would be very difficult with a more ‘traditional’ system. Similarly, conducting ‘field’ studies might be much more effective; I can imagine handing a participant a tablet for them to complete some kind of task in the street, or in a shopping mall, for instance. Also, it may open up the possibility of using the variety of sensors in modern mobile devices (light, proximity, accelerometers, magnetometers) in interesting and creative ways. Finally, the hardware is relatively cheap, and (of course) portable.

I’m itching to try this out, but unfortunately don’t have an Android tablet. I love my iPad mini for lots of reasons, but the more restricted nature of Apple’s OS means that it’s unlikely we’ll see a similar system on iOS anytime soon.

So, very exciting times. Here’s a brief demo video of OpenSesame running on a Google Nexus 7 tablet (in the demo the tablet is actually running a version of Ubuntu Linux, but with the new version of OpenSesame it shouldn’t be necessary to replace the Android OS). Let me know in the comments if you have any experience with tablet-experiments, or if you can think of any other creative ways they could be used.

TTFN.

 

iPad app in development to help with macular degeneration

I’ve written before about iPad apps useful for vision research, but I’ve just come across a new vision-related app, so new in fact that it’s still in the development/testing phase. It’s been produced by my old Colleague Prof. Robin Walker at Royal Holloway University and is designed as a rehabilitative tool for people with Macular Degeneration (MD).

Age-related MD is by far the most common form of blindness/vision-loss in people over 50, and involves degeneration of the visual sensitivity of the centre portion of the retina – the part of the eye which has the highest density of rods and cones. This makes tasks such as reading and recognising faces more and more difficult as the condition progresses. One way of mitigating the effects is to try and use portions of the retina which are less affected, i.e. the periphery. For reading, the ‘eccentric-vision’ and ‘steady-eye’ techniques involve fixating at a point and then moving the text through areas of the visual field which are less affected. These techniques require some practice to counteract the natural tendency to make eye-movements when reading, and it’s this training process that the app is intended to help with.

Read more about the app here, and there’s also a (pay-walled) article in the British Journal of Opthalmology here.

Tablet computers (iPad, Nexus 7, etc.) for children with developmental disorders

A very minimal post merely to point any interested readers towards an interesting discussion going on in the comments section of a post on Engadget here. A reader asked for suggestions for a tablet and/or apps for his developmentally-delayed daughter, and a large number of people have contributed some useful ideas and links. Just try to ignore the (inevitable *sigh*) Android vs. iOS fan-boy squabbling.

iPad app for generating visual psychophysics stimuli

I’ve been meaning to write a new post which would be an update to my previous one on good psychology-related iPhone/iPad apps for a while now, but I just came across one app which is just too good not to share immediately. It’s a free app called RFSpotter, written by Nicolas Cottaris of the  IRCS and Dept. of Psychology at The University of Pennsylvania, and it generates simple visual psychophysics stimuli for use in mapping receptive fields and the tuning properties thereof. It has a very slick interface, where stimulus size, position and rotation can all be controlled by the usual iOS finger-gestures (e.g. pinch-to-zoom to change stimulus size, two-finger rotation for orientation) with many other parameters editable through a pop-up menu. It will do gratings, patches, dot-clouds, coloured stimuli – all kinds of things! Very, very neat indeed.

See this page for more details and a video of it in action, and visit the iTunes store here to download it.

Some screenshots:

The iPad really has the potential to be a serious platform for research, and it’s tools like this that will make it possible to do some really interesting work with it – here’s hoping we see many more specialist, research-oriented apps like this in the future!

Nature Article on the Paperless Lab

Very quick post to point out an interesting article in Nature this week, on how some labs are going paperless for their record-keeping and management. The examples given go well beyond just using an iPad instead of a paper notebook though – well worth a read. You can find the article here.

The iPad and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) for Social Anxiety

The iPad - not totally useless after all, apparently

My lovely wife has just found a new use for her iPad in the course of her clinical work using cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). One of the techniques she uses for socially anxious clients is video recording them giving short presentations. Before giving the talk they generally believe that they will perform very badly, but when they view the video afterwards they’re usually pleasantly surprised by their performance. This technique was first proposed in this paper, and (I’m told) is pretty effective at convincing such clients that sometimes their own predictions of how they’ll perform in a given situation can be inaccurate and negatively biased.

Anyway, she used to do this by lugging along a video-camera, a tripod, and a laptop to her therapy sessions, video-ing the presentation using the camera and tripod, then connecting the camera to the laptop in order to let the client view the video on the larger screen. But, since she got an iPad she just props it up in the corner of the room, shoots a video using the built-in camera on the back (it’s not a great camera, but it’s definitely good enough) and when the client needs to see it, all she has to do is flip the iPad over and hit the play button. Simple, elegant, and all that’s required is the iPad itself. This is definitely the best use I’ve ever heard of for an iPad – perhaps they’re not just expensive toys after all? ;o)

TTFN.

More on e-textbooks, plus Cognopedia

A very small update just to point interested readers to a few things I’ve found recently.

Firstly, you may recall me blogging about e-textbooks for students previously, here and here. Wired.com have just published a couple of articles relevant to this topic. Firstly, they have an opinion piece here which unfortunately comes to the conclusion that publishers are failing to drive along the adoption of e-textbooks at the moment. Interestingly it mentions that many students are already pirating textbooks (downloading them from torrent sites, etc.). Yet another example of how traditional media companies are always behind the curve when it comes to new technology, which forces users to seek illegal routes for what they want to do. The other piece (here) is a run-down of the major pieces of e-reader (e.g. the Amazon Kindle) and tablet (e.g. Apple’s iPad) hardware available at the moment – a nice piece as it compares both classes of device side-by-side.

The other tender morsel which I shall try and tempt your jaded mouse-finger with today is a site called Cognopedia, which is essentially a wiki-like site, but entirely focussed on the brain. Seems to have a lot of good information, and a lot of good embedded videos and multimedia on various topics. Worth checking out. Credit for bringing this to my attention goes to the never-less-than-excellent Mo Costandi (follow him on Twitter: @mocost) and also the relentlessly sublime BPS research digest (here). If you’re a psychology student or a psychologist and you don’t already subscribe to the BPS research digest blog, then you are definitely, definitely missing out.

E-textbooks – a tiny update.

The future - you can touch it.

I blogged the other day about e-textbooks and how they might change the way we study and consume information, and have just come across this page on the Nature site (via the never-less-than-excellent GrrlScientist). It’s an online biology textbook, published by Nature, full of beautiful illustrations, you can read it anywhere you have web-access, on any device, and it’s constantly updated, so it never goes out of date. The future – it’s here!

Kno for iPad, and e-textbooks – the future of studying?

E-textbooks - the future?

OK, I know I ragged on the iPad (and tablets in general) somewhat in this post, but there’s just been a very interesting announcement from a company called Kno, and what can I say, I’m capricious. This company had previously put out a massive piece of hardware, which consisted of two 14.1 inch tablets stuck together – they were marketing this as a digital textbook. The device was generally poorly reviewed, and it looks like they’ve come up with a different strategy – licensing their software for the iPad. You can download the Kno app, and then have access to a store which will sell you e-textbooks for (they claim) 30-50% off the list price.  A quick perusal of their store reveals many common undergraduate psychology titles (although quite a lot are labelled as ‘coming soon’). This has to be better (and cheaper) than carrying around a load of massive textbooks, right? Their software looks pretty good – you can make annotations, share stuff through the normal social-network channels, zoom-in on illustrations etc.

Choosing a computer – Mac? Windows? Netbook? Laptop?

These days most university departments provide at least some basic computing facilities for their students, but most students also want to have their own computer for all-night last-minute essay-writing sessions and/or illegally downloading episodes of ‘The Only Way is Essex’ or ‘Jersey Shore’ (depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re on) outside their university’s firewall. Not that I would ever condone or seek to promote such activity, oh no. Anyway, computers are cheap nowadays, but they still represent a major investment for most students, so here is my advice on the matter. All opinions are mine alone, your mileage may vary etc. etc. Feel free to flame me in the comments if you feel I’ve unjustifiably dissed your favourite OS, or whatever.

The initial decision you need to make is which operating system takes your fancy most – and there are really only two options – Macintosh OS X or Microsoft Windows.* A lot of people get very excited by the Windows vs. Mac issue and Mac users in particular seem to have a genuine and somewhat creepy devotion to their chosen OS. My take though, is that the latest version of both (Windows 7 and OS X 10.6) are excellent, and either one will do everything you could possibly want. I regularly use both and have very little issue with switching between the two pretty much seamlessly. Nowadays, you can even install Windows natively on Mac hardware, so you could potentially buy a MacBook and use it purely as a Windows machine. If you were some kind of pervert.