learningMatlab
Overall aim
Design and write code for a simple orientation discrimination experiment.
To remind you of the details, you can have a look back at the summary of what we want to achieve
From the last time (and the time before)
Inspect the m-files initializeScreen.m and closeScreen.m for my worked solution to last week’s aims. These functions are really quite small, but it’s worthwhile to make them and to abstract out this functionality (a) so we are explicit about what’s happening in our code and (b) because it’s easier to reuse code this way
Together with the functions from the first session, we now have the following functions:
% get info from experimenter + subject
[filename, nTrials, orientations] = getExperimentParams()
[hasConsented] = getSubjectInfo()
% open a screen and close a screen
screenNumber = initializeScreen(screenNumber)
closeScreen()
We are now in a position to go back to our initial plan and build up the general logic of the program.
This session’s aims
Let’s make the function presentTrial()
% decide on the function "interface" - inputs and outputs
% initialize the screen for MGL
...
end
… one possible way to run this
Make a function oriDiscrim() (in its own m-file). This will be the main function that drives the experiment. It will contain the logic shown in the diagram above and call all the appropriate functions that we have written so far
function oriDiscrim()
% oriDiscrim - a simple orientation discrimination experiment + data analysis
%
% <your documentation here>
%
% get info
[filename, nTrials, orientations] = getExperimentParams()
% get consent
[hasConsented] = getSubjectInfo()
% deal with whether subject has consented right here
if hasConsented == false
disp('(!) subject has not consented - exiting')
% return from the main function...
return
end
% sort out details of the trials we want to show
% ...
% a big for loop that displays one trial after the other
% ...
% ... the final bits:
% - analyzing the data and saving it out in a file
end
Helpful commands
Try looking up help for the following things
help mgl
help mglLines2
randperm()