Getting Started¶
Introduction¶
PsychoAnalyze was developed to support research1 in the Moran Lab at Washington University in St. Louis. It is a multi-purpose data platform to assist researchers analyzing data from psychophysical experiments, providing prepackaged libraries for helpful data transformation methods, model-fitting routines, and data visualization features specific to psychophysics research and behavioral psychology/neuroscience.
New to psychophysics?
Psychophysics is a branch of study within behavioral psychology and neuroscience that provides an experimental and analytical framework for the broad purpose of quantifying and modeling the relationship between physical stimuli and perceptual experience.
For an excellent overview of the history and impact of psychophysics, check out the following review published in Neuroscience by J.C.A. Read: The place of human psychophysics in modern neuroscience.
About the alpha release and our roadmap:
Psychoanalyze is currently in an alpha release phase. It is not feature-complete and makes no guarantees to be bug-free. Visit our roadmap to see our plans for upcoming features. In the meantime, relevant sections of this documentation will contain notes on planned features.
Pre-alpha development has focused on high-level infrastructure for the project with future modularity in mind. Beta release will be considered after integration of a much wider variety of experimental formats, analytical methods, and visualization options. Users should expect fast iteration for approved features, especially features with visible community support.
Help us accomodate your use case by proposing a feature on GitHub as a Feature Request or Discussion Topic.
Dashboard¶
For a high-level view of what you can do with PsychoAnalyze, try out the interactive dashboard at https://psychoanalyze.io.
For guidance, check out our Dashboard Guide, or just start clicking around to see what happens!
Try...
- Simulating data by adjusting model simulation parameters.
-
Downloading results in various file formats:
- Tabular data:
.csv,.parquet,.json,.duckdb - Figures:
.png,.svg,.pdf
- Tabular data:
-
Uploading your own dataset or our tutorial dataset according to the specified schema and observe/download the model fits.
Python Installation¶
For custom applications, we provide the psychoanalyze Python package (available on PyPI) to use in your own scripts or apps.
To install psychoanalyze in a Python virtual environment, run the installation command in your terminal:
To get started using psychoanalyze from the command line, execute the --help command in your Python virtual environment:
For more guidance implementing psychoanalyze in your own Python scripts and and apps, check out our notebook example and our API reference.
Python Notebooks¶
For a more thorough introduction to the psychoanalyze package, enjoy our notebook examples! Consider submitting a notebook of your own for inclusion in our collection.
Developers¶
Want to contribute to PsychoAnalyze's code base, or simply get a local instance of Dash or Jupyter running?
Check out our contributing guide, or see what's going on in Developer Discussions on GitHub!💡