Using EBasic

[David McFarlane]

Lisa,

As I recall, Presentation has some very nice high-level facilities 
for generating complex and dynamic visual stimuli on the fly.  By 
contrast, E-Prime has no such facilities.  EP can do some limited 
things with text, for anything else it usually just presents image, 
sound, or movie files.  But you can go beyond this with low-level 
E-Basic code, for that you  would make extensive use of the methods 
of the Canvas object -- see the Canvas topic in the online E-Basic 
Help.  To do this well you would probably want to make a bunch of 
custom subroutines or functions to recreate some of what Presentation 
did for you -- for more on making subroutines and functions, you 
might take a look at Chapter 4 of the User's Guide that came with 
E-Prime, and more particularly work through the classic "VBA for Dummies".

Of course, you could just do this all back in Presentation, which you 
know already does this; or even better, do this all in MATLAB using 
the Psychophysics Toolbox, which has fantastic visual presentation support.

On an off-topic digression, I just learned about a new free 
open-source cross-platform Python-based system called OpenSesame 
(http://www.cogsci.nl/software/opensesame ).  Has anybody tried this, 
and can comment on how it stacks up against E-Prime or other products?

-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder


At 4/16/2011 03:11 PM Saturday, Lisa Levinson wrote:
>I am trying to replicate an event-related potential experiment that
>investigated the development of the magnocellular and parvocellular
>visual pathways. I am not looking to further study the development of
>these pathways, rather their correlation with other behavioral
>measures. The stims were originally programmed using the Presentation
>software language. I have attempted to create modified versions of the
>stims using Quark and Final Cut. I have generated the graphics and
>imported them into E-Studio but the major issue I am having concerns
>the parvocellular stim. If I can't control for luminance then I will
>potentially be eliciting a response from the magnocellular pathway as
>well.
>
>Using EBasic I was wondering if it would be possible to create
>"objects" such as a blue and green high frequency grating in which the
>colors are isoluminant with the background and low spacial frequency
>grayscale grating with a low luminance contrast. I have limited
>programming experience but can work with others who know Visual Basic
>for Applications. I am concerned though the psychophysical nature of
>these stims will not work with EPrime.
>
>Would greatly appreciate some input.

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