Hi everyone,
I am trying to create an annulus stimulus (a gabor with a blank circle in the middle), where the contrast reduces at both the outer and inner edges of the annulus.
Currently I am using a gratingstim with a gauss mask, which works to reduce the contrast at the outer edges, and a circle (shapestim) in the centre, drawn on top of the grating, to make it an annulus. However, I would also like to be able to reduce the contrast towards the centre of the gratingstim, so that there isn’t such a prominent edge transitioning from the grating to the centre of the annulus.
Ideally, I would also be able to choose the point at which the contrast starts decreasing (e.g., grating contrast decreases linearly to 0 over the outer and inner 0.5° radius of the annulus).
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
I tried the following approach. I created a grid with values that represent the distance to the center of the grid (center_x and center_y). Using those distances, I then computed a gaussian function with a peak at d_0. The width can be configured using the c parameter. Note that everything is defined here in pixels. Hope this provides some inspiration, I think the main idea is to have a grid with distance values, and you then compute some kind of function based on those distances
# Stimulus parameters
width = 200
height = 200
center_x = 100
center_y = 100
d_0 = 50
c = 20
# Create a grid to calculate distances
x,y = np.meshgrid(np.arange(0, height), np.arange(0, width))
d = ((x - center_x)**2 + (y - center_y)**2)**0.5
# Calculate the Gaussian function
fx = np.exp(- ((d - d_0)**2)/c**2 )
# Normalize between -1 and 1
fx_final = (2 * fx) - 1
This produces the following mask:
To display the grating, set the mask property as follows:
myGrat = visual.GratingStim(win, sf=0.01, tex='sin', mask=fx_final, size = [width, height]) # circular grating
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