Psychtoolbox-3 History, Credits, License, Citing
History and Credits
Version 1 (released 1995, Macintosh only) was written by David Brainard, with some help from others and support from an NSF ILI grant awarded to David Brainard. Version 2 (released 1996 for Macintosh and 2000 for Windows) was written by David Brainard and Denis Pelli, incorporating Denis Pelli's VideoToolbox, with help from others. In particular, Mei Zhang, Elliot Waldron and Allen Ingling contributed heavily to the first working version for Windows. Version 2.5 for Windows and initial development of the OpenGL Version (now called Version 3) were Allen Ingling's work, supported by core grant NEI P30 EY013079. Mario Kleiner then made extensive improvements to bring Version 3 to its current state. Richard Murray contributed the direct interface to OpenGL calls (MOGL). Tobias Wolf contributed the automatic documentation generator that generates our online function reference.
Version 3 is under active development.
License
The Psychtoolbox-3 and its source code are freely redistributable under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) as published by the Free Software Foundation. Simply put, the GPL says that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change it. By distributing the complete source code for Psychtoolbox-3 under the terms of the GPL, we guarantee that you and all other users will have the freedom to redistribute and change Psychtoolbox. The exact license text of Psychtoolbox is included as License.txt in the root folder of any Psychtoolbox-3 installation. An online version of the license can be found at the GPL page of the Free Software Foundation.
Please don't thank us. Cite us.
You'll be joining a distinguished group of authors and grantees.
If you want to acknowledge use of this software when you publish your research, you might say something like this,
"We wrote our experiments in Matlab, using the Psychophysics Toolbox extensions (Brainard, 1997; Pelli, 1997)."
Brainard, D. H. (1997) The Psychophysics Toolbox, Spatial Vision 10:433-436. [PDF]
Pelli, D. G. (1997) The VideoToolbox software for visual psychophysics: Transforming numbers into movies, Spatial Vision 10:437-442. [PDF] [HTML]
We're happy and grateful to find that more and more users are now citing their use of this software. Getting this credit helps us justify the time we continue to devote to developing and maintaining this free software for use by the entire vision community.
Although these papers were written in reference to Version 2 of the toolbox, they remain the best current citation. Once the software stabilizes a bit more, we hope to write a short note describing the design and implementation of Version 3 so that appropriate credit may be given to those who made substantial contributions to PTB-3.
A note for users of the EyelinkToolbox.
