Moviestim = None leads to an error message

Builder
1

OS (e.g. Win10): Win10
PsychoPy version (e.g. 1.84.x): 2023.2.3
Standard Standalone? (y/n) If not then what?: y

I’m creating an experiment where I sometimes need to show a movie, and at other times I need to show a picture.

I have specified the paths for the moviefiles and picture files in an excel sheet. I have written None in the trials where no movie or picture should be shown. This works fine when only playing a movie but no picture, but when I get to a trial with a picture but no movie, I get the following error message:

22.3774 EXP New trial (rep=0, index=5): {‘Trial’: 6, ‘Target_Movie’: ‘None’, ‘Picture’: ‘Stimuli/Movies/025c.png’, ‘Correct_response’: 1, ‘File_type’: ‘png’, ‘Set_ID’: ‘1_Test’}
25.1755 EXP window1: mouseVisible = True
3.8961 WARNING Monitor specification not found. Creating a temporary one…
File “C:\Users\Documents\Experiments\recogtest\recog_lastrun.py”, line 748, in
run(
File “C:\Users\Documents\Experiments\recogtest\recog_lastrun.py”, line 510, in run
movie.setMovie(Target_Movie)
File “C:\Users\AppData\Local\Programs\PsychoPy\lib\site-packages\psychopy\visual\movies_init_.py”, line 174, in setMovie
self.loadMovie(value)
File “C:\Users\AppData\Local\Programs\PsychoPy\lib\site-packages\psychopy\visual\movies_init_.py”, line 216, in loadMovie
raise FileNotFoundError(“Cannot open movie file {}”.format(
FileNotFoundError: Cannot open movie file None
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 000001d41f904300] stream 0, timescale not set
ioHub Server Process Completed With Code: 0
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 000001d453a1d6c0] stream 0, timescale not set
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 000001d455564a00] stream 0, timescale not set
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 000001d457dca900] stream 0, timescale not set
[mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2 @ 000001d453908780] stream 0, timescale not set
################ Experiment ended with exit code 1 [pid:10504] #################

2

Hello

there are two problems with this approach.

  • None is a reserved word in Python, see here Python None Keyword
  • With your approach, PsychoPy tries to load a picture/movie called None which does not exist.

You could create a routine showing your stimulus and make the execution of the routine conditional.

Best wishes Jens

3

Thank you for your reply. I was just wondering why it doesn’t work, as works for images.

Best, Katrine

4

Hello

The best way to find out why None does not work for movies but does for images is to post a issue on github GitHub - psychopy/psychopy: For running psychology and neuroscience experiments.

Best wishes Jens