Subject: Free software for stimulus delivery and experimental control From: "David L. Woods" <dlwoods(at)UCDAVIS.EDU> Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 11:29:50 -0800Auditory list members may be interested in the new release of Presentation, a free program for stimulus delivery and experimental control for experiments using fMRI, ERP/MEG, TMS, single unit recording, animal conditioning, psychophysics and reaction time methods. Presentation can control up to four independent, simultaneous sound sources. It delivers visual and/or multimodal stimuli and video animations with precise frame control at all video refresh rates and monitors responses with sub-ms precision without special hardware. To assure experimental accuracy, timing precision is verified for each stimulus and response event. Version 0.47 also incorporates the following enhancements relative to version 0.43: (1) Support for serial and parallel port input and output on Windows 2000/XP; (2) Mouse and joystick position monitoring; (3) New Presentation Control Language (PCL) features including subroutines, access to response data and access to stimulus data; (4) Experimenter feedback features including a text output window, a parameter monitoring window, and a text display window; (5) A new web-based licensing scheme; and (6) a new online user forum for technical support. Benchmark testing shows that a temporal precision of Presentation on Windows 95/98/ME/2000 or XP approaches the precision of dedicated hardware. For example, benchmark testing of continuous animations and concurrent sound delivery on a Windows2000 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 2,580 individual researchers have installed Presentation more than 5,400 times. Give it a try! Version 0.47 and demos are available 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(at)ucdavis.edu Publications: http://marva4.ebire.org/hcnlab