Programs for Visual Psychophysics on the Amiga: a Tutorial
Behavior Research Methods. Instruments. & Computers 1989, 21 (5), 548-563 Programs for visual psychophysics on the Amiga: A tutorial STUART ANSTIS York University, North York, Ontario, Canada and MICHAEL PARADISO Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Foundation, San Francisco, California A typical psychophysical experiment presents a sequence of visual stimuli to an observer and collects and stores the responses for later analysis. Although computers can speed up this process, paint programs that allow one to prepare visual stimuli without programming cannot read responses from the mouse or keyboard, whereas BASIC and other programming languages that allow one to collect and store observer's responses unfortunately cannot handle prepainted pic tures. A new programming language called The Director provides the best of both worlds. Its BASIC-like commands can manipulate prepainted pictures, read responses made with the mouse and keyboard, and save these on disk for later analysis. A dozen sample programs are provided. Psychophysics is much easier with the aid of graphics Arts). Methods for using DPaint in visual psychophysics on a home computer (Cavanagh & Anstis, 1980), and the have been described in an earlier article (Anstis, 1986). Commodore Amiga is one of the best home computers The latest version (DPaint ill) also permits page-flipping for colored graphics. The Amiga has some advantages animations. over the more expensive Macintosh II, in that it can hold A new program greatly increases the usefulness of the many more pictures in memory to enable page flipping. Amiga. This is The Director (The Right Answers Group, The Amiga has only 16 gray levels (4 bits per gun per Box 3699, Torrance, CA 90510, (213)-325-1311).
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