How can I generate visual stimuli like those used in the Brain Observatory?

Technical
,
1

You can use the AllenSDK (http://alleninstitute.github.io/AllenSDK/) to access stimulus templates and/or parameters to recreate these stimuli with your favorite experimental control software.

An example Jupyter notebook demonstrating how to access the Natural Scenes, Natural Movies, and Locally Sparse Noise stimuli used in the Brain Observatory: Visual Coding is available here:

http://alleninstitute.github.io/AllenSDK/_static/examples/nb/brain_observatory_stimuli.html

At this time, our stimulus code is not available for sharing, due to the level to which it has been optimized for our custom hardware and data acquisition protocols. We are currently exploring how to best share this code and hope to make this available in the future.

2

Hi,
Is there news regarding sharing the synthetic stimuli code?

3

Hi @quinn

No, our stimulus code is not available publicly because it is so tightly integrated with Institute-specific hardware and software systems. Our resources have been focused more on generating new data than on making these resources available. FWIW, our stimulus software systems are built on top of the open source software https://www.psychopy.org/ .

Best regards,
Wayne