More useful links… Open Sesame, the psychology of email, Inkscape, and others.

Another quickie post (it’s been ages since I’ve written anything substantive I know, bear with me just a little while longer…) with some links-of-interest for you.

First up is Open Sesame – this is an experiment-builder application with a nice graphical front-end, which also supports scripting in Python – nice. Looks like a possible alternative to PsychoPy with a fair few similar features. Also, it’s cross-platform, open-source and free – my three favourite things!

Next up is Inkscape – this is a free vector graphics editor (or drawing package), with similar features to Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw. I tend to use Adobe Illustrator for a few specialised tasks, such as making posters for conferences, and this looks like a potentially really good free alternative.

Neuroimaging Made Easy is a blog I found a while ago that I’ve been meaning to share; it’s mostly a collection of tips and downloadable scripts to accomplish fairly specific tasks. They’re all pretty much optimised for Mac users (using AppleScript) and people who use BrainVoyager or FSL for their neuroimaging – SPM users are likely to be disappointed here (but they’re pretty used to that anyway, right?! Heh…). Really worth digging through the previous posts if you fall in the right segments of that Venn diagram though – I’ve been using a couple of their scripts for a while now.

Penultimately, I thought this recent article on Mind Hacks was really terrific – titled: “Psychological self-defence for the age of email”. It covers several relevant psychological principles and shows how they can be used to better cope with the onslaught of e-mail that many of us are often buried under.

Lastly, I hope you’ll pardon a modicum of self-promotion, but I recently did an interview over Skype with the lovely Ben Thomas of http://the-connectome.com/. Unfortunately the skype connection between London and Los Angeles was less than perfect which meant he couldn’t put it up as a podcast, but he heroically transcribed it instead – if you are so inclined, you can read it here.

TTFN.

A scanner-shaped cake (MRI, maybe PET/CT?)

Made for the occasion of the first birthday of Imanova last night, and greedily consumed by slightly hungover scientists this morning.

Video tutorial on designing and running psychology experiments using PsychoPy

PsychoPy is something which I’ve been meaning to write something substantive on for a while. Briefly though, it’s a system for designing and running experiments, programmed in the Python language, with a nice GUI front-end to it. I’ve only flirted with it briefly, but the open-source and cross-platform nature of it makes it a very attractive package for programming experiments, in my opinion. If I was learning this stuff for the first time, it’s definitely the system I’d use.

The purpose of this post was just to publicise a YouTube video, put up by the creator of PsychoPy – Jon Peirce, of Nottingham University. The video is a great little starter-tutorial for PsychoPy and gently walks the viewer through creating a simple experiment – great stuff.

Happy experimenting! Here’s the vid: