PsychoPy
This post will describe why I prefer using PsychoPy before other software. When I started getting involved in research (i.e., when doing my Bachelor’s and Masters’s theses), I used the software that was accessible to me. That is, some of the most commonly used software in the department I was studying at. After starting my Ph.D. studies, I got increasingly annoyed with one of the software we used to build experimental tasks in (i.e., E-prime).
First, I was unfamiliar with the scripting language (called ‘e-basic’) that was needed, for instance, to solve pseudo-randomization and send signals to a specially built device I was going to use in my experiments. Second, I prefer to use Linux systems, and e-prime is limited to Windows. In fact, e-prime seemed to work best with Windows Vista or earlier, but our lab computers were, and are, running Windows 7 (which might have changed back then). Some time into my Ph.D. studies, I found PsychoPy, which is written in Python, a programming language that I did know. It seemed like a good alternative to e-prime, and other similar software, to create experiments in.