Stimulus Software

E-Prime

http://www.pstnet.com/eprime.cfm E-Prime features a graphical "drag and drop" interface for creating simple experiments. For more complex experiments there is E-Basic scripting. Be sure to use E-Prime 3 or 2. The very old E-Prime 1.0 is buggy with unreliable timing.

Presentation

http://www.neurobs.com/ Presentation is able to deliver stimuli with millisecond timing accuracy. Presentation is very flexible and can be used to control nearly any behavioural experiment.

NBS training videos for Presentation are on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/NBSTraining

Psychtoolbox

Psychtoolbox (PTB) is a free set of Matlab functions. Psychtoolbox is installed on the Stimulus PC in the scanner suite.
The recommended environment for PTB is GNU Octave running on Ubuntu. A bug in the Mesa Graphics driver in Ubuntu 22.04.3 prevents PTB from working properly. At present the only workaround is to use a different version of Ubuntu.
Update: PTB3.0.17 returns limited support for PTB on MacOS with Octave 6.1.

See Porting to Octave for help with common issues when converting from MATLAB.

PsychoPy

Psychopy is a free stimulus program package with both graphical and text scripting. To date, getting a single computer to reliable run everyones PsychoPy code has proved nearly impossible. If we make changes to a computer to run one script, it breaks that machine for everyone else. For this reason, BIU does not support Psychopy. If you wish to use it, bring your own computer.

Psychopy does not work well with Ubuntu 20.04LTS. We've also had trouble getting it to work reliably on 22.04LTS, due to a bug in the graphics driver. Windows 10 is perhaps a better choice at the moment.