[visionlist] Introducing Palamedes: Matlab routines for analyzing psychophysical data

[Nick Prins]

Dear colleagues,

We are pleased to announce the launch of Palamedes, a free toolbox of 
Matlab routines for the analysis of psychophysical data.

Features include:

-Maximum Likelihood fitting of Psychometric Functions (PF), with the 
unique feature of simultaneous multi-condition fitting of PFs: 
Palamedes allows one to fit PFs to several data sets simultaneously 
while allowing flexible control over parameters to define custom 
models. Just to give one example (but many more possibilities exist): 
Palamedes can fit individual thresholds to multiple conditions of an 
experiment while constraining the lapse rate to be equal between 
conditions (giving the obvious advantage of obtaining more reliable 
lapse rate estimates).

-Bayesian PF fitting.

-Maximum Likelihood Difference Scaling (includes generation of 
stimulus sets, simulation of experimental data, data analysis)

-Parametric and Non-parametric Bootstrapping

-Signal Detection Measures (for a wide variety of tasks)

-Goodness-of-fit tests (including Goodness-of-fit of multi-condition PF fits)

-Statistical Model Comparisons (e.g., "do thresholds differ 
significantly between experimental conditions?" or even: "do 
thresholds vary as a linear function of, say, adaptation duration or 
is that accelerating/decelerating trend in the data 'real'?").

-Adaptive Methods (up/down, best PEST, QUEST, Psi Method).

All user-end routines include elaborate help comments, including 
example code that will execute when typed into command window. Also 
provided is a set of heavily commented demonstration scripts which 
guide the user through all of the major analyses.

The Palamedes toolbox requires basic Matlab only, no additional 
toolboxes are required. The toolbox is compatible with older versions 
of Matlab (going back to at least release 14 [2004], and likely much further).

Palamedes can be downloaded at no cost here:

www.palamedestoolbox.org

Questions and comments may be sent to:

palamedes at palamedestoolbox.org (but please visit our website first)

Sincerely,

Nick Prins and Fred Kingdom
______________________________________
Nicolaas Prins, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
University of Mississippi
University, MS 38677
Phone: 662-915-1207
Fax: 662-915-5398
e-mail: nprins at olemiss.edu
______________________________________