Computer & Software

The stimulus computer is a Dell PC, running Windows 10. The machine is networked, therefore data can be accessed from your home space by mapping a network drive to it. Those running a study from outside the unit will need to transfer their stimuli script from a memory device. This can be tricky because of security settings that require all external data sources to be scanned for viruses before use. Use a memory stick with as little on it as possible if you can, otherwise the scanning might take very long.

Stimulus presentation software is either E-Prime 2, Matlab, Presentation, Python, Psychopy or R. Input and output are through the parallel port for E-Prime, or through a National Instruments PCI6503 Card for Matlab. Presentation, Python, PsychoPy and R can use either input/output methods.

There is a switch to change between the Parallel Port and NI card on top of the STIM PC. Always check at the beginning of your experiment whether you see the correct triggers in the recording! If nothing is coming through check the switch is on your specific input/output port.

You can also include a little bit of code in your stimulus presentation script that checks for the right port (example for PsychToolbox).