Support for fMRI experiments

mih

Hi,
started playing around with 0.25 I noticed that there is no out-of-the-box support for fMRI experiments, where one typically needs to sync to triggers send from the scanner. There is the port_reader plugin, but that is windows-only. It seems like inline-scripts + PySerial are the best way to address this in OpenSesame. I just wonder whether somebody is already working on something like this?

Interesting features to have would be: Wait for first/next trigger; wait for a particular trigger pulse (counted since start of the experiment/block/trial), log current trigger number for any event of interest, log temporal distance from last recorded trigger.

A generic implementation would probably need a separate thread that can poll whatever device to keep track of the incoming trigger, register callbacks or tell opensesame when to run the next loop iteration ...

Michael

sebastiaan

Hi Michael,

Good to see you on the forum!

As far as I know, nobody is working on this. Which is a shame, because it would be immensely useful to have a set of plug-ins for communicating with a scanner. Is this typically done through the parallel port, like EEG, or the serial port?

Regards,
Sebastiaan

mih

Unfortunately, every center seem to do something different. I have seen scanner setups that send trigger pulses through a keyboard interface (e.g. send the ! character as trigger signal), serial connections (e.g. send a value 5), and parallel ports (e.g. 5V pulse on pin 10). So the outside connection varies, but once a trigger is identified as such the functionality would be common/shared: count them, sync to them, log them.

Best, Michael