Free software for stimulus delivery

["David L. Woods" <dlwoods@UCDAVIS.EDU>]

Clin-neurophysiol list members 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 a 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