Tip for starting experimenters

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Hey,

I am making a presentation about PsychoPy and what does someone needs to know to start with PsychoPy. I am writing it from the beginning (Installing) hopefully all the way to running a successful experiment.

If there’s one piece of advice you’d give, what would it be?
If there’s a common bug that you always encounter? What is it? and what is a good solution for it?
If there’s a good really simple experiment you can run in PsychoPy to see the inner workings of the software, what is it?

I would appreciate any help! Thank you so much.

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If you unpack the Builder demos in the latest version, there’s a folder called “Understanding PsychoPy” which has some experiments to do just this :slight_smile:

If there’s one bit of advice I’d give, it’s this: COMMENT CODE!!! Future you will thank you

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Google is your best friend :slight_smile:

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Hi,

I recently did a presentation on the psychopy builder for beginners. If you want i can send you my slides. They are in Italian, but it should be clear what topics i presented.

If you are interested send me your e-mail!

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I learnt pretty late that you can copy and paste components as well as whole routines :sweat_smile: saves a lot of time… For troubleshooting printing current values of some variables can be really helpful. And as for common bug I pretty frequently forget to set constant to set every repeat whenever I use a variable as text or image component…

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I’ll add one that made me lose so much time. When I started using code components I always forgot to ad “:” at the end of if statements and averytime it took me ages to realize what the error was

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Hi There,

Love this idea! Here is some feedback from tweeters too! https://twitter.com/psychopy/status/1418127495807836160?s=20

My own feedback:

If there’s one piece of advice you’d give, what would it be?

Don’t be afraid to break things - when you break something you learn something new (or find a bug that you can report on github and contribute to the project!)

If there’s a common bug that you always encounter? What is it? and what is a good solution for it?

If you are taking a study online, most bumps people encounter is because PsychoJS is younger than PsychoPy and not every component exists in PsychoJS yet.

To make sure you get a smooth transition online:

  1. Check the status of online options to see what you can and can’t do out-of-box online.

  2. Use PsychoPy version 2021.2 or later! it will be muuuch smoother!

  3. Check out the most up-to-date crib sheet

If there’s a good really simple experiment you can run in PsychoPy to see the inner workings of the software, what is it?

The first experiment I ever saw in PsychoPy … the Stroop task! (you can find on pavlovia or in the demos!).

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