PyFlies: A Domain-Specific Language for Designing Experiments in Psychology

Abstract

The majority of studies in psychology are nowadays performed using computers. In the past, access to good quality software was limited, but in the last two decades things have changed and today we have an array of good and easily accessible open-source software to choose from. However, experiment builders are either GUI-centric or based on general-purpose programming languages which require programming skills. In this paper, we investigate an approach based on domain-specific languages which enables a text-based experiment development using domain-specific concepts, enabling practitioners with limited or no programming skills to develop psychology tests. To investigate our approach, we created PyFlies, a domain-specific language for designing experiments in psychology, which we present in this paper. The language is tailored for the domain of psychological studies. The aim is to capture the essence of the experiment design in a concise and highly readable textual form. The editor for the language is built as an extension for Visual Studio Code, one of the most popular programming editors today. From the experiment description, various targets can be automatically produced. In this version, we provide a code generator for the PsychoPy library while generators for other target platforms are planned. We discuss the language, its concepts, syntax, some current limitations, and development directions. We investigate the language using a case study of the implementation of the Eriksen flanker task.