Device and Experiment

........In the last article, I just said that I got my first TvC function. But that was a pilot study, and I didn't control some environment factors like the environment luminance. I didn't calibrate the monitor before the pilot experiment. So after confirming the program worked, I began to do the calibration stuff. Unfortunately, it took me about a whole week. At the beginning, the measurement device, the lightmous, didn't work. After changing different monitor and PC, finally I found the offender, the USB keyboard. Because the driver of the lightmouse is the same with the USB mouse "and " USB keyboard, so if we plug the lightmouse and any one of the USB mouse or keyboard simultaneously, the Window system will get confused. Therefore, I replaced the new USB keyboard to an old PS2 keyboard.

........But the tragedy not end yet, the gamma table that I got was a little bit odd. The last 18 level of the gamma function was flat. So again, I change the monitors and computers. This time, I figured out the suspect was the video card then got a normal gamma function. And because I needed to use another video card, I had to use another computer. I installed the Psychophysics Toolbox of version 3.0 in the new one. Besides my boss, Dr. Chen, I am the only one voluntary pioneer to discover that. There are some routines changed in the version 3.0. The order of the arguments that should be passed into the Screen function, for example, is different:


Screen(win,'PutImage',...) become Screen('PutImage', win,...)


Therefore, all the old exp program are needed to be modified. And the biggest one is that, version 3.0 in Window system "CAN NOT" change the color lookup table!! Unless the lookup table we passed is a monotonically increasing lookup table. So if I want to present the colorful stimulus, the matrix of the image should be an n-by-m-by-3 one that each the third dimension indicates the intensity of different guns respectively. And also, we can't play Clut animation any longer...

........Anyway, yesterday I overcame all of the obstacles and everything finally went just right. Should I love this part in the research? It's quite hard to answer this question. Everyday I left the lab without figuring out the problem with frustrated mood, that is really bad. But yesterday I left the lab with hope and confidence, however, that is great. And a loss may turn out to be a gain.
.
.
.