Access to the documentation?

Programming Help
1

Hello,
I’m new on this discussion group.
I’ve some skills in Matlab programmig but really new in using the PTB toolbox (to be honest, I installed it yesterday ^^).

I’ve read the guideline of this discussion group but I’ve some trouble in finding all the documentation related to PTB.

I can access the (very good) tutorials of Peter Scarfe BUT the docs.psychtoolbox.org site does not seem to be currently running. Do you know if a mirror exists about this documentation ?

I can access at the API documentation but at this point, I’m too noob to use it right now…

On the other hand, if I look in the directory of PTB, I find :

  • a PsychDocumentation folder but the organisation of the different parts are hard to read for a newbie
  • a PsychDemo folder but all files are in a plane directory, it’s difficult to tell the easy demo files from the advanced ones

In general, what kind of documentations do you recommend in order to learn this toolbox ? Perhaps I missed some useful sites or documents.

Thanks a lot :slight_smile:

BR

Pierre

2

Hello again,
I’ve also found this documentation site : Home · Psychtoolbox-3/Psychtoolbox-3 Wiki · GitHub

3

docs.psychtoolbox.org was our old website for API documentation. It is defunct and replaced by the API documentation you found already.

You mostly got the typical stuff. The intro PDF from ECVP 2013 in the subfolder PsychDocumentation, then the tutorials from Peter Scarfe and for beginners, the sometimes basic, but more often more advanced demos and tutorials in the PsychDemos subfolder, etc. the ‘help Psychtoolbox’, which provides function help and is identical to what our online API documentation shows (the website is auto-generated from the content). Then the other stuff. And if you Google long enough there will be various intro courses, probably some text books. However, i’d recommend keeping in mind that none of these text books or 3rd party tutorials is written by the actual experts, so they often contain outdated or suboptimal information, because whoever wrote the book/course stopped learning the new methods 15 years ago, or didn’t bother to read our docs and documentation carefully themselves before writing a book about it.

There are also higher level toolboxes built on top of Psychtoolbox which may be beginner friendly for relatively standard stuff that doesn’t need the full power and flexibility of PTB. None of these are tested or reviewed for correctness and quality by us, they are independent 3rd party efforts, so i don’t know how high the quality or maturity is. Both are also quite new, e.g.,:

There are various other higher level toolboxes for different domains of research, we don’t have a systematic overview, e.g., MonkeyLogic 1, RigBox, The Objective Psychophysics Toolbox (o_ptb), … Celia Foster also gave a 12 minutes high level “what’s new” a month ago at VSS 2022, which can be found on Youtube under this link

-mario

4

Hello Mario,
thanks a lot for your answer, i’ve dived into the different links and it was very useful :slight_smile:

BR

Pierre