[vslist] New version of free software for stimulus delivery and experimental control

[David L. Woods]

Vision scientiests may be interested in the new release of Presentation, a 
free program for stimulus delivery and experimental control. Presentation 
is designed for experiments using fMRI, ERP/MEG, TMS, single unit 
recording, animal conditioning, eye movements, psychophysics and reaction 
time methods. It delivers visual stimuli and video animations with precise 
frame control at all available video refresh rates and monitors responses 
with sub-ms precision without special hardware. Presentation can also 
control up to four independent sound sources and deliver multimodal 
stimuli. To assure experimental accuracy, timing precision is verified for 
each stimulus and response event.
Version 0.47 also incorporates following enhancements: (1) Device drivers 
to improve real-time precision on Windows XP/2000 and new support for 
multi-user Windows XP/2000 machines; (2) Enhanced Presentation control 
language (PCL) with subroutine support, reference value subroutine 
arguments, text output, control of pause, resume and quit, and improved 
clock access (e.g., including adjustments in interval timing, etc.). (3) 
Improved parallel and serial input/output control. (4) Mouse cursor 
position monitoring; (5) Experimenter screen monitoring of hits, misses and 
false alarms in real-time; (6) Flexible text input/output to either 
experiment or subject monitor; (7) An improved web-based licensing scheme 
and (8) a new user forum.

Benchmark testing shows that temporal precision of Presentation on Windows 
95/98/ME/2000 or XP approaches the precision of dedicated hardware systems. 
For example, benchmark testing of continuous animations and concurrent 
sound delivery on a PC with a 900 MHz Athlon CPU showed that temporal 
imprecision exceeded 1.0 ms for only 2.09 sec of a 9.52 hr test. 
Presentation will be distributed for free until 2004. More than 2,500 users 
have installed Presentation more than 5,300 times. Join the Presentation 
family and give it a try!

Version 0.47 and demos are available for free download at www.neurobs.com.


David L. Woods, Professor of Neurology, Dept. of Neurology,UC Davis,
Chief, Clinical Neurophysiology and Chief, Research fMRI imaging,
Neurology Service (127E), VA-NCHCS, 150 Muir Rd., Martinez, CA 94553
Tel (925) 372-2571, Fax (925) 229-2315 Email:dlwoods@ucdavis.edu
Publications: http://marva4.ebire.org/hcnlab