PsychoPy shuts down while running experiment

project 21-22.zip (2.8 KB)

Dear all,

I’m a master’s student of experimental psychology and for a specific course we are required to do some literature reading, setting up a research paradigm, write a script, collect data and analyze the data. all of this is done, and for the moment i have started with collecting the data.

But there seems to be a big problem when I’m running this experiment (which I added here as a zip file). I ran the experiment on my own laptop and there is no problem. but when the script is run on the PC’s in the lab, PsychoPy itself shuts down. Not the window where stimuli are presented is shutting down, I don’t get any error messages. PsychoPy itself shuts down. I can’t wrap my head around it. I wished i could’ve given you some error messages so that it is clear to you where the error lays. But I’m not able.

The experiment itself consists of 21 blocks of 144 trials each. In every trial participants are presented with 12 Gabor patches of which one differs in orientation. The Gabor patch that differs in orientation is the target and the participant has to detect in in which quadrant the Gabor patch is placed. 4 types of responses are possible: arrow pointing up, arrow to the left, arrow to the right and arrow pointing down. The experiment itself is quite boring (I know) but that in itself is not very important.

The experiment itself is coded in PsychoPy version 2021.2.3, while it is run in PsychoPy version 2022.2.4.
If there are any further questions, please feel free to ask them, I will tend to them ASAP.

Cheers,
Sam

Dear Sam,

do other experiments run without problems?

Best wishes Jens

Dear Jens,

thank you for replying. But in the meantime the problem has been solved!
as it turns out, there is a memory leak in the PsychoPy coder, which makes PsychoPy to shut itself down.

Cheers,
Sam

Hello Sam,
Sorry for bothering, but I just had the same problem with my program. I created it on my laptop and then copied the program on the lab computer. Sometimes works, but sometimes it shuts down in the middle of the experiment, even if I don’t have a lot of coding in it. Can I ask you if you remember what passages you did to solve the problem? Or if you have any suggestion?

Thank you so much!
Laura

Hello Laura

Do you use a lot of print commands? This was mentioned in another post as causing problems.

Best wishes Jens