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.

 

Open-Source software for psychology and neuroscience

Researchers typically use a lot of different pieces of software in the course of their work; it’s part of what makes the job so varied. Separate packages might be used for creating experimental stimuli, programming an experiment, logging data, statistical analysis, and preparing work for publication or conferences. Until fairly recently there was little option but to use commercial software in at least some of these roles. For example, SPSS is the de facto analysis tool in many departments for statistics, and the viable alternatives were also commercial – there was little choice but to fork over the money. Fortunately, there are now pretty viable alternatives for cash-strapped departments and individual researchers. There’s a lot of politics around the open-source movement, but for most people the important aspect is that the software is provided for free, and (generally) it’s cross-platform (or can be compiled to be so). All that’s required is to throw off the shackles of the evil capitalist oppressors, or something. 

So, there’s a lot of software listed on my Links page but I thought I’d pick out my favourite bits of open-source software, that are most useful for researchers and students in psychology.

First up – general office-type software; there are a couple of good options here. The Open Office suite has been around for 20 years, and contains all the usual tools (word processor, presentation-maker, spreadsheet tool, and more). It’s a solid, well-designed system that can pretty seamlessly read and write the Microsoft Office XML-based (.docx, .pptx) file formats. The other option is Libre Office, which has the same roots as Open Office, and similar features. Plans are apparently underway to port Libre Office to iOS and Android – nice. The other free popular options for presentations is, of course, Prezi.

There are lots of options for graphics programs, however the two best in terms of features are without a doubt GIMP (designed to be a free alternative to Adobe Photoshop) and Inkscape (vector graphics editor – good replacement for Adobe Illustrator). There’s a bit of a steep learning curve for these, but that’s true of their commercial counterparts too.

Programming experiments – if you’re still using a paid system like E-Prime or Presentation, you should consider switching to PsychoPy – it’s user-friendly, genuinely cross-platform, and absolutely free. I briefly reviewed it before, here.  Another excellent option is Open Sesame.

For statistical analysis there are a couple of options. Firstly, if you’re a SPSS-user and pretty comfortable with it (but fed up of the constant hassles of the licensing system), you should check out PSPP; a free stats program designed to look and feel like SPSS, and replicate many of the functions. You can even use your SPSS syntax – awesome. The only serious issue is that it doesn’t contain the SPSS options for complex GLM models (repeated measures ANOVA, etc.). Hopefully these will be added at some future point. The other popular option is the R language for statistical computing. R is really gaining traction at the moment. The command-line interface is a bit of a hurdle for beginners, but that can be mitigated somewhat by IDEs like R-Commander or RStudio.

For neuroscience there’s the NeuroDebian project – not just a software package, but an entire operating system, bundled with a comprehensive suite of neuroscience tools, including FSL, AFNI and PyMVPA, plus lots of others. There really are too many bits of open-source neuro-software to list here, but a good place to find some is NITRC.org.

So, there you are people; go open-source. You have nothing to lose but your over-priced software subscriptions.

TTFN.

BPS Hackathon – 21st June; LaTeX, R, Python goodness

Very exciting news here: I’ve just been invited to the first British Psychological Society (Maths, Statistics and Computing Section) Psychology open textbook hackathon!

Inspired by this event (where people got together and wrote an open-source maths textbook in a weekend) the day aims to raise awareness and skills, as well as perhaps produce some usable output.

The organisers are Thom Baguley of Nottingham Trent University (and the Serious Stats blog and book) and Sol Nte of Manchester University. They’ve very kindly invited me as a guest, so I’ll be hanging out and learning some new tricks myself, I’m sure.

Here’s the flyer for the event, with sign-up details etc. It’s free, but strictly limited to 20 places – if you’re keen, best be quick… (click the pic below for a bigger version):