asf: A Simple Framework for behavioral and neuroimaging experiments

asf stands for A Simple Framework for presenting visual, auditory and tactile stimuli in behavioral, electrophysiological and neuroimaging experiments. It is based on the Psychophysics Toolbox for Matlab www.psychtoolbox.org. The idea is to write a program that reduces the experimenter’s task of programming behavioral experiments to generating tables of stimulus- and trial descriptions while accurate timing of stimuli, collecting responses from different devices such as voice-keys, button boxes or a computer mouse, generating triggers for EEG/MEG equipment and synchronization with MR-scanners and response-logging is dealt with in the background. I hope that ASF makes experimenting simpler and that it is easy to use.

Installation

Prerequisites:

• working installation of Matlab
• working installation of Psychophysics toolbox (PTB3)

The asf project is now hosted by google code http://code.google.com/p/asf/ where you can download a release version (.zip) that contains a collection of files which you need to extract to a location on your computer’s hard drive in a directory with a name such as ‘C:\applications\ASimpleFramework’.

Developers might be interested in downloading a copy of the entire repository.

Documentation, Tutorials and forum

On asf's homepage you will also find demos and tutorials.

Furthermore there is a forum to where users can discuss issues arising when working with asf