Mitali Tanna_AU2020182

Lab in psychology

TUTORIAL 1
Staircase Procedure to find the Threshold contrast of a visual grating

Perform an adaptive staircase procedure to find the threshold contrast of a visual

grating. The participant performs a detection task in which they report the
location at which the grating appeared. The grating can appear either at the left
or right side of the central fixation. The staircase procedure must have 100 trials
with a starting contrast value of 0.05. After performing the experiment, open the
data file and see how the contrast value changed over the trials. Create a plot
with the contrast value (column with the name trials.intensity) in the y-axis and
the trial number on the x-axis. Create another plot with accuracy on the y-axis
and trial number on the x axis. Compare these two plots.

Introduction
The staircase method, which increases stimulus contrast if participants
incorrectly identify the position of the visual grating from the central fixation
and decreases stimulus contrast if participants correctly identify the position of
the visual grating from the central fixation, is used to measure the responses
provided by participants in the aforementioned visual grating task to determine
the Threshold contrast. The contrast is now increased or decreased step by step,
with the step size being flexible. The staircase process is so named because the
ascent and reduction resemble the steps of a staircase. Depending on the
participants' first response and subsequent behaviour, the stimulus contrast
changes to either increase or decrease. When determining the threshold and/or
difference threshold of a specific stimulus, one uses this technique (light, sound
etc.). Alternative threshold measurement techniques include the limits method,
which is more straightforward but less effective than the staircase method.
Method
The tutorial 1.0/visual grating task was created using the Psychopy application
to measure the threshold at which participants had to press the right or left
arrow key on the keyboard by determining whether the visual grating appeared
on the right or left side of the fixation and that the gratings were of varying
contrasts randomly across trials. The staircase approach was applied to
determine the contrast's threshold value.
In order to introduce a stimulus in between trials, we first add a static
component that starts at 0 and lasts for 1 second. The next step is to add a cross-
shaped fixation at 1.0 seconds and change its size and placement on the screen.
Next, add the grating, which starts at 2 and lasts for 300 milliseconds (0.3), with
the position being the variable. Every repeat must have this set, and every
variable must have this selected.
Use the keyboard option in replies, enter "left" and "right" in the box for
allowed keys, and leave the timer at 2.0 seconds to allow the participants to
react. In the data tab, choose the store correct checkbox and enter "$corrAns" in
the correct answer field.
To specify when the grating must show on the right or left side of the fixation,
enter a code now. Select code function from the Custom tab by clicking. The
code's "if" condition function operates according to the axiom that there is an
equal chance that a random value between 0 and 1 would be less than or greater
than 0.5. The grating will show on the left side of the fixation if it is greater than
0.5, and vice versa.
Last but not least, include a loop with 100 iterations and an excel file conditions
box that defines the requirements for running the staircase operation. The
starting value will be the contrast value, its minimum and maximum value and
step sizes and change the loop size to interleaved staircase option.

Results

Graph 1- Contrast value of the visual grating plotted against number of trials.
X-axis Number of trials
Y-axis Contrast Value at each trial

Fig. 1 demonstrates the relationship between the number of trials and the contrast value. There
seems to be a gradual increase and decrease in the contrast value of the gratings as the trials
progress. The average threshold is 0.049937 and we can see that there is sudden increase in the
contrast value of gratings in the end.
 contrast value at each trial
0.0501

0.05

0.0499

0.0498

0.0497

0.0496

0.0495

0.0494
0 20 40 60 80 100 120

Graph 2- Accuracy level (score row in excel) of the responses plotted against
number of trials
X-axis Number of trials
Y-axis Accuracy of responses (0 or 1)
Fig. 2 demonstrates the accuracy of the participant in each trial. According to the data, the
participant responded mostly correctly but also gave some incorrect response.

accuracy level
1.2

0.8

0.6

0.4

0.2

0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
 Discussion
Since the observer or participants have been found to detect a value lower than
their reported threshold value, their observations and detections are unreliable
and biassed, which is also true for the current participant's case in this particular
experiment. This is one of the limitations of the staircase procedure.

Link to the github- https://github.com/mitalitanna/mitali