I have a similar background to Alex's graduate student. I had never
touched a programming language until I started grad school. I used the
Psychophysics Toolbox for one year, then learned python specifically to
make the switch to Vision Egg. Again, I am a BAD PROGRAMMER. I am sure
the psychophysics toolbox can do everything that vision egg can do, but
it is much more memory intensive, harder to learn, and runs on a
proprietary platform. For an experienced programmer who is also doing
data acquisition in matlab, the toolbox could be a great way to go. As
a novice, I found that I could make much more sophisticated stimuli
with vision egg.
That is my two cents! Thanks for all the hard work Andrew!
Jordanna Sprayberry
On Aug 4, 2005, at 9:26 AM, Alex Holcombe wrote:
I am certainly not the right person to ask about how easy it is for novices to become useful with the Vision Egg! Although this has been a design goal of mine (see http://www.visionegg.org/moin.cgi/Documentation/Tutorial ), I'm far too biased to be reliable. I ask others to send reports to the mailing list. Hopefully we can address issues that come up, and any success stories would be nice, too.
For me the case of my grad student here is an inspiring success story. This student had never programmed before in her life, but with Python and the VisionEgg, after several months of hard work she had a working program that implements a psychophysical experiment with moving gabors, a sophisticated response collection, and a trial structure with counterbalanced conditions.
Amazingly, she achieved this almost entirely through self-teaching. I and a few others only showed her a few pointers, mostly basic programming concepts (remember, she had probably never even heard of a for loop before this project) and she learned the rest through trial and error, modification of the VisionEgg demo programs, and by looking up things in the web.
I looked at her code recently and saw that she isn't even using arrays it seems, for each gabor it's gabor1, gabor2, gabor3, gabor4, gabor5,
yet with this continued lack of programming sophistication, she is nevertheless totally successful with VisionEgg!
This does not necessarily mean that VisionEgg is easier than Psychtoolbox, as the IDE and help systems are more user-friendly with MATLAB and perhaps there are more demos available with PsychToolbox and certainly a larger user base to get help from. However, there are other advantages of VisionEgg as mentioned in the last message and at least one total tyro has managed to learn it.
Alex Holcombe
` HolcombeA@xxxxxxxxxxxxx W:+44(0)29 2087 0141 M:+44(0)79 6361 8875 http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/psych/holcombea
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