Programming the validation

We received some emails from blog visitors about which programs we use for the development of this set. Up to now we used Adobe Lightroom (which in the end, we didn't need at all), the Gimp, Matlab, and UFRaw. 

For the validation we had the choice of using one of several presentation programs, among which were Inquisit, E-Prime, Presentation and the Matlab Psychtoolbox. We actually decided to go with PsychoPy, a presentation library for Python, which makes the validation program platform independent and open source. Convenient, when you program on OS X or Linux, but need to run on Windows XP.

We needed some kind of intelligent way of distributing all images across participants, so that everybody rates the same amount of models, with the same amount of different emotions and eye gazes. Because of this, we first programmed a sequence generator in Python that generates the sequences of stimuli any participant will see before the validation even starts. Our script utilizing PsychoPy subsequently reads these sequences and shows the appropriate images according to someone's participant number. We had to program the functions to show likert scales or open ended questions ourselves, but hey, Python is fun. 

Monday, we start with data collection. After this, we analyze the ratings and will create the infrastructure to distribute the set. We'll keep you posted.

Ron