Re: [psychopy-users] weird spatial frequency for GratingStim when units = 'pix'?

[Jonathan Peirce]

Actually when the units are pixels the sf units are cycles/pixel (and
when the units are degrees the sf units are c/deg etc). You probably
want a setting more like sf=0.1 so you get one cycle per 10 pixels. The
effects you're getting are due to aliasing. At 0.99 you're completing
most of a grating cycle per pixel, at 1.0 you complete an entire cycle
per pixe;, so you get a uniform field.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Jon

On 16/07/2012 11:23, Matthew Johnson wrote:
> Hi all. I'm an experienced coder but semi-new to Python and brand-new
> to PsychoPy, so apologies in advance for stupid questions.
>
> I'm on 1.74.00 on Windows 7 (using the Coder). I'm trying to do
> Tutorial 1 from the website (that's how new I am) but playing around
> with it a bit.
>
> I'm currently running the tutorial code tweaked to look something like
> this:
>
> from psychopy import visual, core
> mywin =
> visual.Window([1440,900],monitor='MJOffice',fullscr=True,units='pix')
> grating = visual.GratingStim(win=mywin, mask='circle', size=250,
> pos=[-200,0], sf=0.990, ori=90)
> grating.draw()
> mywin.update()
> core.wait(2.0)
>
> It's not clear from the documentation what the expected behavior of a
> GratingStim is if units are set to 'pix', but I am semi-sure this is
> weird no matter what.
>
> Basically, reasonable values for the sf parameter appear to be from
> about 0.9 to 0.999 (but not exactly 1.0). Any other value appears to
> yield a solid patch.
>
> After some trial and error, I found that the displayed spatial
> frequency relates to the height of the screen and bears no relation to
> the size of the grating. The exact formula appears to be:
>
> sf = 1.0 - (cyc / screenHeight)
>
> if I want a spatial frequency that completes cyc cycles in
> screenHeight pixels (and because my actual screen height is 900
> pixels, that means reasonable values are in the .9-.999 range or so).
> Of course one could do a few calculations and get the right spatial
> frequency, but this seems like it is not the intended behavior.
> Presumably if units are 'pix', you'd want sf to indicate something
> like cycles per [grating size].
>
> FYI, I interrogated the value of self._cycles within
> _calcCyclesPerStim of the GratingStim class, and it is spitting out
> values that change with the size parameter of the grating, even though
> the actual spatial frequency you see onscreen doesn't change when you
> alter the size parameter. Unfortunately, that's about as far as my
> current PsychoPy knowledge can take me, debugging-wise.
>
> This isn't a critical issue for me, but thought you'd like to know.
> Keep up the good work!
>
> Cheers,
> Matt Johnson
>
>
> PS #1: To Jon and Jeremy -- this is the Matt Johnson you may recognize
> from Nottingham-Malaysia and Yale, respectively. Hello!
>
> PS #2: As of v1.74, some of the online docs are now a bit out-of-date
> (e.g., Tutorial 1 and psychopy.visual still link to PatchStim), and
> some behavior appears not to be documented (e.g., neither the old
> PatchStim page nor the "Units for the window and stimuli" page
> describe the expected behavior for units of 'pix' in a grating). Just
> an FYI. I'll be happy to help out with code/documentation
> contributions once I get some more knowledge under my belt!
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--
Jonathan Peirce
Nottingham Visual Neuroscience

http://www.peirce.org.uk


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[Matthew Johnson]

Ah, yes, that's completely it. Not sure why it didn't occur to me earlier (end of a long day, I suppose). I tried various values between 0-1 but I suppose I stumbled on the aliased range before I stumbled on the range (0 to .3 or so) that is actually correct usage for cycles/pixel.

At any rate, now that you've pointed it out, that's of course 100% reasonable behavior, given the way 'cm' and 'deg' operate. (I suppose an argument could be made that cycles/stimulus, as with 'norm' and 'height', could be a slightly more common use case for pixel people -- at least, it's what first occurred to me to try -- but either way it's no trouble to convert from one to the other.)

I'm sure it's a complete pain keeping the documentation up to date with PsychoPy under active development, but whenever the next round of documentation updates occurs, might I humbly suggest adding in a bit about 'pix' in the Units page (http://www.psychopy.org/general/units.html)? It's the only unit not documented yet, and I suspect others (like myself) who are migrating from PsychToolbox might be stuck in a pixel frame of mind too.

Thanks for the help. I'm sure I'll be pestering you for more retroactively-obvious answers soon.

Cheers,
Matt

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