Software for Psychology/Physiology Experiments

We will develop a comprehensive, flexible laboratory software system that controls stimuli anddata acquisition in NIH health-related research studies, to meet the needs of research in cognitivepsychology and neurobiology, in terms of both capabilities and convenience. The Phase I workplan ispart of the overall goal, and is to initially develop the software necessary to present full screen graphicsstimuli under a flexible system of user-specified experimental control, as follows: 1) to develop thegeneral code to set up the flow and timing of tasks in an ongoing experimental trial, 2) to develop thespecific code to implement image presentation as one of the tasks to be executed during theexperimental trial, 3) to implement the code so that timing of video stimulus presentations aresynchronized to the vertical refresh of the video screen to ensure that all stimulus presentations areaccurately timed and are flicker free, and 4) to develop a file (or database) structure for storage ofcompressed images, and software for retrieval of such images.