Several Python programming books feature tools designed for experimental psychologists. What sets this book apart is its focus on eye-tracking. Eye-tracking is a widely used research technique in psychology and neuroscience labs. Research grade eye-trackers are typically faster, more accurate, and of course, more expensive than the ones seen in consumer goods or usability labs. Not surprisingly, a successful eye-tracking study usually requires sophisticated computer programming. Easy syntax and flexibility make Python a perfect choice for this task, especially for psychology researchers with little or no computer programming experience. This book offers detailed coverage of the Pylink library, a Python interface for the gold standard EyeLink ® eye-trackers, with many step-by-step example scripts. This book is a useful reference for eye-tracking researchers, but you can also use it as a textbook for graduate-level programming courses.

PsychoPy is an open-source software package for creating rich, dynamic experiments in psychology, neuroscience and linguistics. Written by its creator, this book walks you through the steps of building experiments in PsychoPy, from using images to discovering lesser-known features, and from analysing data to debugging your experiment. Divided into three parts and with unique extension exercises to guide you at whatever level you are at, this textbook is the perfect tool for teaching practical undergraduate classes on research methods, as well as acting as a comprehensive reference text for the professional scientist. Essential reading for anyone using PsychoPy software, the second edition has been fully updated and includes multiple new chapters about features included in recent versions of PsychoPy, including running studies online and collecting survey data. Part I teaches you all the basic skills you need (and some more advanced tips along the way) to design experiments in behavioral sciences. Each chapter introduces anew concept but will offer a series of working experiments that you can build on. Part II presents more details important for professional scientists intending to use PsychoPy for published research. This part is recommended reading for science professionals in any discipline. Part III covers a range of specialist topics, such as those doing fMRI research, or those studying visual perception. "This book fills an incredibly important gap in the field. Many users of PsychoPy will be excited to learn that there is now a highly accessible and well-designed written guide to refine their skills." – Susanne Quadflieg, University of Bristol

A textbook for students with limited background in mathematics and computer coding, emphasizing computer tutorials that guide readers in producing models of neural behavior. This introductory text teaches students to understand, simulate, and analyze the complex behaviors of individual neurons and brain circuits. It is built around computer tutorials that guide students in producing models of neural behavior, with the associated Matlab code freely available online. From these models students learn how individual neurons function and how, when connected, neurons cooperate in a circuit. The book demonstrates through simulated models how oscillations, multistability, post-stimulus rebounds, and chaos can arise within either single neurons or circuits, and it explores their roles in the brain. The book first presents essential background in neuroscience, physics, mathematics, and Matlab, with explanations illustrated by many example problems. Subsequent chapters cover the neuron and spike production; single spike trains and the underlying cognitive processes; conductance-based models; the simulation of synaptic connections; firing-rate models of large-scale circuit operation; dynamical systems and their components; synaptic plasticity; and techniques for analysis of neuron population datasets, including principal components analysis, hidden Markov modeling, and Bayesian decoding. Accessible to undergraduates in life sciences with limited background in mathematics and computer coding, the book can be used in a “flipped” or “inverted” teaching approach, with class time devoted to hands-on work on the computer tutorials. It can also be a resource for graduate students in the life sciences who wish to gain computing skills and a deeper knowledge of neural function and neural circuits.

A project-based guide to the basics of deep learning. This concise, project-driven guide to deep learning takes readers through a series of program-writing tasks that introduce them to the use of deep learning in such areas of artificial intelligence as computer vision, natural-language processing, and reinforcement learning. The author, a longtime artificial intelligence researcher specializing in natural-language processing, covers feed-forward neural nets, convolutional neural nets, word embeddings, recurrent neural nets, sequence-to-sequence learning, deep reinforcement learning, unsupervised models, and other fundamental concepts and techniques. Students and practitioners learn the basics of deep learning by working through programs in Tensorflow, an open-source machine learning framework. “I find I learn computer science material best by sitting down and writing programs,” the author writes, and the book reflects this approach. Each chapter includes a programming project, exercises, and references for further reading. An early chapter is devoted to Tensorflow and its interface with Python, the widely used programming language. Familiarity with linear algebra, multivariate calculus, and probability and statistics is required, as is a rudimentary knowledge of programming in Python. The book can be used in both undergraduate and graduate courses; practitioners will find it an essential reference.

Programming is an important part of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and Python is an ideal language for novices. It sports a very readable syntax, intuitive variable management, and a very large body of functionality that ranges from simple arithmetic to complex computing. Python for Experimental Psychologists provides researchers without prior programming experience with the knowledge they need to independently script experiments and analyses in Python. The skills it offers include: how to display stimuli on a computer screen; how to get input from peripherals (e.g. keyboard, mouse) and specialised equipment (e.g. eye trackers); how to log data; and how to control timing. In addition, it shows readers the basic principles of data analysis applied to behavioural data, and the more advanced techniques required to analyse trace data (e.g. pupil size) and gaze data. Written informally and accessibly, the book deliberately focuses on the parts of Python that are relevant to experimental psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists. It is also supported by a companion website where you will find colour versions of the figures, along with example stimuli, datasets and scripts, and a portable Windows installation of Python.

This is a printed edition of the official Python language reference manual from the Python 3.2 distribution. It describes the syntax of Python 3 and its built-in datatypes and operators. Python is an interpreted object-oriented programming language, suitable for rapid application development and scripting. This manual is intended for advanced users who need a complete description of the Python 3 language syntax and object system. A simpler tutorial suitable for new users of Python is available in the companion volume "An Introduction to Python (for Python version 3.2)" (ISBN 978-1-906966-13-3). For each copy of this manual sold USD 1 is donated to the Python Software Foundation by the publisher, Network Theory Ltd.

Python is a free, open-source, cross-platform programming language that allows a great deal to be accomplished in very few lines of code. As well as having a powerful, flexible syntax, Python can interface easily with other libraries and hardware on any computer system, making it ideal for interacting with additional devices hardware (e.g. for fMRI, EEG, eye tracking etc.). Python has become the go-to language for a wide variety of behavioural science studies and experiments. Aimed at advanced undergraduate students, postgraduate students and professional scientists, this textbook provides a comprehensive guide to enable readers to write experiments in Python, or using Python within PsychoPy. This text offers a more advanced guide to developing psychological experiments in Python and can be used as a guide to using software and hardware together - for example, programming a psychological experiment using eye tracking software or EEG systems. Highly practical in nature, the book shows how to programme one full experiment and how to analyse data and scripting. Read together with Building Experiments in PsychoPy, this text is designed to support students who are familiar with PsychoPy and how want to progress into programming in the original software package Python (on which PsychoPy is built). It will help advanced students to programme directly in Python and support them when they use hardware in their experiments, and it particularly suited to those students programming experiments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

Written by a leader in the field, this book discusses the role of vision in reading. The author describes the influence of physical properties of text on reading performance and the implications for information processing in the visual pathways. He explores different forms of low vision that affect reading, text characteristics that optimize reading for those with low vision, principles underlying the legibility of text, and guidelines for displaying text. Special topics include the role of the magnocellular pathway in reading and dyslexia, Braille reading, and fonts for highway signs. An accompanying CD contains reprints of the seminal series of articles by Gordon E. Legge and colleagues published between 1985 and 2001.

The distinguished contributors to this volume have been set the problem of describing how we know where to move our eyes. There is a great deal of current interest in the use of eye movement recordings to investigate various mental processes. The common theme is that variations in eye movements indicate variations in the processing of what is being perceived, whether in reading, driving or scene perception. However, a number of problems of interpretation are now emerging, and this edited volume sets out to address these problems. The book investigates controversies concerning the variations in eye movements associated with reading ability, concerning the extent to which text is used by the guidance mechanism while reading, concerning the relationship between eye movements and the control of other body movements, the relationship between what is inspected and what is perceived, and concerning the role of visual control attention in the acquisition of complex perceptual-motor skills, in addition to the nature of the guidance mechanism itself. The origins of the volume are in discussions held at a meeting of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP) that was held in Wurzburg in September 1996. The discussions concerned the landing effect in reading, an effect, that if substantiated, would provide evidence of the use of parafoveal information in eye guidance, and these discussions were explored in more detail at a small meeting in Chamonix, in February 1997. Many of the contributors to this volume were present at the meeting, but the arguments were not resolved in Chamonix either. Other leaders in the field were invited to contribute to the discussion, and this volume is the product. The argument remains unresolved, but the problem is certainly clearer.

We make 3-5 eye movements per second, and these movements are crucial in helping us deal with the vast amounts of information we encounter in our everyday lives. In recent years, thanks to the development of eye tracking technology, there has been a growing interest in monitoring and measuring these movements, with a view to understanding how we attend to and process the visual information we encounter Eye tracking as a research tool is now more accessible than ever, and is growing in popularity amongst researchers from a whole host of different disciplines. Usability analysts, sports scientists, cognitive psychologists, reading researchers, psycholinguists, neurophysiologists, electrical engineers, and others, all have a vested interest in eye tracking for different reasons. The ability to record eye-movements has helped advance our science and led to technological innovations. However, the growth of eye tracking in recent years has also presented a variety of challenges - in particular the issue of how to design an eye-tracking experiment, and how to analyse the data. This book is a much needed comprehensive handbook of eye tracking methodology. It describes how to evaluate and acquire an eye-tracker, how to plan and design an eye tracking study, and how to record and analyse eye-movement data. Besides technical details and theory, the heart of this book revolves around practicality - how raw data samples are converted into fixations and saccades using event detection algorithms, how the different representations of eye movement data are calculated using AOIs, heat maps and scanpaths, and how all the measures of eye movements relate to these processes. Part I presents the technology and skills needed to perform high-quality research with eye-trackers. Part II covers the predominant methods applied to the data which eye-trackers record. These include the parsing of raw sample data into oculomotor events, and how to calculate other representations of eye movements such as heat maps and transition matrices. Part III gives a comprehensive outline of the measures which can be calculated using the events and representations described in Part II. This is a taxonomy of the measures available to eye-tracking researchers, sorted by type of movement of the eyes and type of analysis. For anyone in the sciences considering conducting research involving eye-tracking, this book will be an essential reference work.