Simple Reaction Time

[DominiqueMakowski]

This is the follow up of #162 with some more details about what I would like to do.

As psychologists are very interested in reaction times, a program for their experiment should separate the display part (loading stimulus and rendering it) from the response collection phase (I imagine it as a minimal while loop only checking for input to increase precision).

It seems that in Makie, those two aspects are somehow integrated, and I am not sure how to use it to build, for instance, a simple reaction time.

In a nutshell, such task would simply display a stimulus (let's say a green circle) and wait for the user's input (and compute the reaction time between stimulus rendering and response).

Using GLFW, I managed to do it, except for the stimulus display, and surely quite inefficiently (disclaimer: my experience with such program is based on pygame: I have no experience with openGL and it might be my way of thinking that is oldschool or just plain wrong):

import GLFW, Dates

monitor = GLFW.GetVideoMode(GLFW.GetPrimaryMonitor())

# Create a full-screen window and its OpenGL context
window = GLFW.CreateWindow(monitor.width, monitor.height, "ReactionTime.jl", GLFW.GetPrimaryMonitor())

# Make the window's context current
GLFW.MakeContextCurrent(window)


t0 = Dates.now() # Get starting time

# Loop until the user closes the window
while !GLFW.WindowShouldClose(window)

	# Render here
	# I don't know how to draw a stimulus

	# Get event
	# GLFW.SetKeyCallback(window, GLFW.Key)  # ok I didn't find how callback works either
	key_pressed = GLFW.GetKey(window, GLFW.KEY_SPACE)
	if key_pressed
		t1 = Dates.now()  # Get time
		rt = t1 - t0  # Compute reaction time
		println("The Reaction time is $rt")
		break
	end

	# Swap front and back buffers
	GLFW.SwapBuffers(window)

	# Poll for and process events
	GLFW.PollEvents()
end
 
GLFW.DestroyWindow(window)

Is such reaction time task, with a good precision and control, feasible in Makie? If not, what other backend / tools should I look for?

Thanks a lot!!

[SimonDanisch]

Is such reaction time task, with a good precision and control, feasible in Makie?

I want it to be feasable! :D
I will try to add functionality to make this work! So you want to have an explicit renderloop, right?
Something like:

scene = Scene()
insert_stimulus_plot(scene)
t0 = time()
while isopen(scene)
     if ispressed(scene, Keyboard.space)
	rt = time() - t0  # Compute reaction time
	println("The Reaction time is $rt")
    end
    draw_frame(scene)
end

?

If there are any performance problems, we should fix them as fast as possible anyways ;)

[DominiqueMakowski]

exactly!

[jayschwa]

It sounds like the feature request applies to a downstream package, so I'm closing this issue. Re-open if I am mistaken.