The Evolved Person Perception & Cognition Lab
The Evolved Person Perception & Cognition Lab

TOOLS, Other STIMULI AND SOFTWARE and some other labs

This is a collection of stuff that we use or we have found useful over the years.  In no particular order....

(please note that you will probably need to seek permission to use these resources)

BPS New Covid-19 research resources hub

Vision Resources

The AVA - Promoting Vision Research and its Applications

Includes information on, grant reviewing and writing, Software for visual psychophysics: an overview and other stuff too.

 

 

Stimulus Generators and software

Faces:

  • Face generator: You are free (see web site) to download the demo version and then generate faces to suit. They come out with a little water mark when generated (they also have no hair).

 

Bodies: Two generators used by professionals and amateur animators alike.

 

Object Line drawings:

The IUAV image dataset

  • This is a database of line drawings (772 images of industrial/commercially produced products) from Marco Bertamin and Michele Sinico free to use via the OSF. The set includes author information, object classification, category (computer vs free hand drawing), sec of author, shading information, file size and resolution file size, type and ratio. Also included are (naive raters) ratings:

  • Beauty (ugly/beautiful),

  • Lightness (dark/light),

  • Complexity (complex/simple),

  • Weight (heavy/light), Style (old/modern),

  • Danger (dangerous/safe),

  • Symmetry (asymmetry/symmetry)

  • The ratings were from naive observers

Please cite: Bertamini, M. & Sinico, M. (2019). A study of objects with smooth or sharp features created as line drawings by individuals trained in design. Empirical Studies of the Arts, doi: 10.1177/0276237419897048

Some royalty-free websites (as ever please credit if you use) for photos, images etc are:

• Creative Commons – a search potral : you need to select ‘use commercially’ and to double check that the license of the image you’d like to use allows for commercial use.

• Pxhere – Free of copyrights under creative commons (Note that conditions state that anyone who is identifiable should not be shown in a negative light).

• Pixabay – All content is released by Pixabay under the Content License

• Hippopx – Free of copyrights under creative commons

• Unsplash – Unsplash photos can be used freely under their license for commercial and non-commercial purposes (no permissions required - but please attribute). But the “photos cannot be sold without significant modification” and, “compiling photos from Unsplash to replicate a similar or competing service”.

Experiment generators and on-line particpant recruitment (crowd sourcing) sites.

  • PsyscopeX The classic experiment generator for the mac (updated and improved). It is a work in progress but it has been around for a while. It is easy to use and reasonably reliable. It’s also free.

 

  • PsychoPy concieved, built and designed by Dr Jon Pearce (University of Nottingham) as a free (open source) alternative to other ([insert brand name here]) experimental generators. This is a python programming language based experimental generator that works across all platforms.

It's an ongoing project and any bugs typically infrequent, often minor, and usually fixed by Jon and others, fairly quickly. Best of all it's  free, and it has a nice and fairly intuitive GUI if you don't like programming but you can get under the hood and get it to do pretty much anything you want. It’s also very easy to generate simple experiments e(including psychophysical types) using lists without any programming experience

  •  Opesesame - More open source freeware that can be used to program experiments. It's python based and it is backended by PsychoPy. Mostly very easy to use and it has more colourful GUI than PsychoPy. Being open sourced and python based you can either use the GUI or get under the hood and code. It's also multi-platform.

  •  Vision-egg - This is another s an Open GL hig level Python platform experimental generator for visual science experiments (largely). If you use this software please cite Straw, Andrew D. (2008) Vision Egg: An Open-Source Library for Realtime Visual Stimulus Generation. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics. doi: 10.3389/neuro.11.004.2008

 

  • Gorilla.SC (TM). - Easy to build, online experiment generator (runs in your browser). It’s versatile and has lots of advanced features. No need to know how to code. Plus lots of online support. Build for free but pay per respondent.

  • Labvanced - Intuitive and easy to build online experiment generator (runs in your browser). It’s versatile and has lots of advanced features. No need to know how to code. Lots of templates to follow/use. Various pricing plans including a free version (handy for students).

  • jsPsych - This is a JavaScript library, for running experiments on the internet in a web browser. The library was created by Josh de Leeuw (and others).

    • If you use it please cite: de Leeuw, J. R. (2015). jsPsych: A JavaScript library for creating behavioral experiments in a web browser. Behavior Research Methods, 47(1), 1-12. doi:10.3758/s13428-014-0458-y

  • Experiment Maker from Toybox labs (software for research):

    • This is billed as a “WYSUWG editor for behaviural experiments”. It runs in your browswer. No coding required and instant feedback as you setup. Includeds tempates.

On-line participant recruitment (crowd sourcing) sites.

  • Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) - This may appeal to some of you as research tool (it’s actually for crowd sourcing for research).

  • ProlificAcademic Pure crowd sourcing – UK based (I think) but with worldwide reach. They have an ethical pay rate (minimum wage).

Programming/Coding.

  • Python for the practicing neuroscientist: (By Mark Kramer and Uri Eden © Copyright 2020.) Lots of modules here. They recommend taking things from a problem solving perspective but you don’t have to. It’s good stuff. They recommend using python v 3. It ‘s free but if you’d lik eto donate to them go here

 

Speech/sound analysis software:

  • Praat: Free (open GL) speech analysis software for acoustic analysis (by Paul Boersma, University of Amsterdam). It's also multi-platform.

  • Audacity ® is open source (cross-platform) software for recording and editing sounds. It’s free and very easy to use.

  • Pasrelmouth Praat Scripts in Python - This is a citable Python Jupyter Notebook to Measure Voice Pitch and HNR. you will need to make sure you have all the libraries installed when you run it. Curtosey of David Fiendberg, via the OSF.

  • VoiceLab v0.2 Reproducible Automated Voice Analysis for beginners and experts.

Face Morphing software

  • Psychomorph - The best and it’s free though it is a bit tricky to get started with:

 

A version of this is also being developed here.  And an accessible and handy guide was developed by Clare Sutherland (University of York). It can be found here: 

  • FantaMorph - (not free) but pretty reliable and easy enough to use.

 

  • SqirlzMorph - Also free but has less control. It's fun though

 

  • MorphAnalyser (2.4) this is an independent web browser platform that allows you to view and manipulating 3D images. A very handy wiki can be found here.

 

More face resources can be found here

  •  Face stimulus and tool collection  - Including databases, tools and other things, as compiled by Ryan M. Stolier  at NYU Psychology

  •  Psychomorph (Tiddeman and Perrett, 2001) - Psychomorph is a very handy way of manipulating face images, for use in experiments as stimuli. It runs in Java script. A very handy user guide by Clare Sutherland can be found here.

  • WebMorph (@webmorph_org - Follow) WebMorph is an online app for transforming (morphing, transforming, and morphometric techniques) face images for research. It was developed by the ever excellent Lisa DeBruine (@LisaDeBruine) of Glasgow University (and Bernie Tiddeman). You will need to create an account to use it. Lots of resources there.

    • A handy manual can be found here.

  • MeshLab is “an open source system for processing and editing 3D triangular meshes.
    It provides a set of tools for editing, cleaning, healing, inspecting, rendering, texturing and converting meshes. It offers features for processing raw data produced by 3D digitization tools/devices and for preparing models for 3D printing.”

Face movement/behaviour analysis:

  • OpenFace 2.2.0: This is a facial behavior analysis toolkit from Tadas Baltrušaitis in collaboration with CMU MultiComp Lab led by Prof. Louis-Philippe Morency. It is “a tool intended for computer vision and machine learning researchers, affective computing community and people interested in building interactive applications based on facial behavior analysis. This includes:

    • Facial Landmark Detection.

    • Facial Landmark and head pose tracking.

    • Facial Action Unit Recognition.

    • Facial Feature Extraction.

    • Gaze tracking.

  • Citations. If you use the software please make sure you credit the creators:

    Overall system

  • OpenFace 2.0: Facial Behavior Analysis Toolkit Tadas Baltrušaitis, Amir Zadeh, Yao Chong Lim, and Louis-Philippe Morency, IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, 2018

    Facial landmark detection and tracking

  • Convolutional experts constrained local model for facial landmark detection A. Zadeh, T. Baltrušaitis, and Louis-Philippe Morency. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, 2017

  • Constrained Local Neural Fields for robust facial landmark detection in the wild Tadas Baltrušaitis, Peter Robinson, and Louis-Philippe Morency. in IEEE Int. Conference on Computer Vision Workshops, 300 Faces in-the-Wild Challenge, 2013.

    Eye gaze tracking

  • Rendering of Eyes for Eye-Shape Registration and Gaze Estimation Erroll Wood, Tadas Baltrušaitis, Xucong Zhang, Yusuke Sugano, Peter Robinson, and Andreas Bulling in IEEE International. Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2015

    Facial Action Unit detection

  • Cross-dataset learning and person-specific normalisation for automatic Action Unit detection Tadas Baltrušaitis, Marwa Mahmoud, and Peter Robinson in Facial Expression Recognition and Analysis Challenge, IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, 2015

Other stuff:

 

  • Psytookit: From Glasgow University, this is part experiment generator and part teaching aid. It’s free and it’s rather easy to use. Also see wikipedia for a summary.

  • An Interactive Introduction to Fourier Transforms by Jez Swanson

  • Photopedia - online image editor (Or make illustrations, web design or converting between different image formats)

 

Linguistic databases:

 

 

Psycholinguistics data bases:

 

DOIs getter:

If like me your reference manager does manage dois or (also like me) you are a bit half-hearted when collecting references and don’t have the dois try this free service:

Once registered all you need do is just import, copy/paste or type in your reference and then return it and your dois will be given to you…. If they are available.

The Brain Bridge Lab

The Brain Bridge lab work on the bridge between memory and perception. They are based at the University of Chicago and are lead by by Dr. Wilma Bainbridge at the University of Chicago

Resources here:

  • This is a collection of data sets that have been made publicly avaible by the BRain Bridge Lab. It includes

    • 10k US Adult Faces Database

    • Aphantasic Drawing Database

    • Big Data in the Psychological Sciences

    • MTL & VVS ROI Collection

    • Memorability Experiment Maker

    • Natural Image Statistical Toolbox for MATLAB

    • Object Interaction Envelope Stimuli

    • Memory Drawing Data and Scoring Experiments

    • Psytoolkit Psychophysics Scripts

    • HRI Sensor Data

    • Large-Scale Boundary Transformation Database

  • Make sure you cite the work/source accordingly.

Icelandic Vision Lab

The Icelandic Vision Lab is interested in all things visual, particularly the higher-level or “cognitive” aspects of visual perception

 Where to put my paper?

  • This is JANE (Journal/Author Name Estimator): Jane is where, if you have written a paper and you aren’t sure where to put it, you can paste your abstract in to their search box (you can also search with key words and there are extra options for language, publication type, open access etc) and it will provide suggestions (including citation rankings). You might also be interested in relevant articles or you might want to find a reviewer for a paper. this is curtesy of B i o S e m a n t i c s, in the Netherlands.

Literature review software

  • Research Rabbit is a new way to do literature reviews. It enables to to find related papers, refine and to store those searches. Very hand, still evolving as a tool. contact Email: team@ResearchRabbit.ai or follow on Twitter: @RsrchRabbit

Stats related 

  • JASP - Free easy to use (Bayesian and Frequentist) stats software. (R based)

  • Alternatively you can try

  • JAMOVI - Free easy to use stats software. (R based - R scripting and development available)

Delighted with JASP and JAMOVI, but need some graphs?

Data plotting in Excel

He also recommends this Beyond Bar Graphs: Free Tools and Resources for Creating More Transparent Figures for Small Datasets from ecrLife blog:

PsyPAG and MSCP section summer school: using computing in analysis (2021)

This is a collection of videos and resources for using computing in your analysis: PsyPag-MSCP-Section Simulation Summer School which will be running from the 4th-30th June 2021

Getting started in R and R studio (A glorious resource from Andy Field) R and R Studio

Introduction to basic idea of simulation using Excel with Dorothy Bishop.

Why and How: “First of a series of short lectures given at University of Oxford in February 2021”

POWER ANALYSIS: A fantastic set of resources for calculating and understanding power estimates and effect sizes using G*Power, Jamovi and Super power, by James Bartlett (jbartlett@arden.ac.uk). A lot of work went in to this so make sure you reference it if you use it.

Also see

  • From Rstudio - Rmarkdown for fully reproducible documents. Rmarkdown allows you to integrate your raw data, your analysis scripts, , the results of your analyses, and a narrative text, all together in one file.

 

  • StatCheck : Wanna check for errors in your reported statistics? A free online tool for just that job.

Useful free images (for lectures, talks, etc)

  • Unsplash: “The internet’s source of freely usable images.”

Other stuff not elsewhere specified: