goxpyriment

goxpyriment is a high-level Go framework for building behavioral and psychological experiments.

Just want to run demo experiments? → Jump to Demos.

Want to write your own experiment? Goxpyriment is well suited to “vibe-coding” psychology experiments — but humans enjoy coding with it too:

  1. Install Go on your machine (see https://go.dev/doc/install).
  2. Clone this repository (git clone https://github.com/chrplr/goxpyriment.git or download ZIP).
  3. Fire your favorite AI coding agent (gemini-cli, claude, cursor…) inside the goxpyriment folder and ask it to review the provided examples; then prompt it to program your experiment, describing it in plain language (stimuli, design, etc.).
  4. Once the code is created, e.g. in my_experiment/, test it by running go run my_experiment/main.go in the terminal.
  5. Optionally, build installers for Windows, macOS, and Linux to distribute to colleagues — no Python or libraries needed on their machines (see https://github.com/chrplr/retinotopy-go for an example).

Goxpyriment relies on the libsdl library through the go-sdl3 bindings. Its API is largely inspired by expyriment.org:

Krause, F., & Lindemann, O. (2014). Expyriment: A Python library for cognitive and neuroscientific experiments. Behavior Research Methods, 46(2), 416–428. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0390-6

See also gostim2 for a simpler, no-code experiment generator.

Christophe Pallier, March 2026

Features

Installation

Demos

You can download here ready-to-run examples of experiments created with goxpyriment (and check their source code if you want).

Install Go and the library to compile source code

Download and install Go from https://go.dev. While Python is easy, Go is simple, which is a good thing.

go get github.com/chrplr/goxpyriment

Quick Start

Here is the code of a minimal “Hello World” experiment (the full version with audio is at examples/hello_world/main.go):

package main

import (
	"github.com/chrplr/goxpyriment/control"
	"github.com/chrplr/goxpyriment/stimuli"
)

func main() {
	exp := control.NewExperimentFromFlags("Hello World", control.Black, control.White, 32)
	defer exp.End()

	instr  := stimuli.NewTextBox("Press any key to start.", 600, control.FPoint{X: 0, Y: 0}, control.DefaultTextColor)
	hello  := stimuli.NewTextBox("Hello World!", 600, control.FPoint{X: 0, Y: 0}, control.DefaultTextColor)
	finish := stimuli.NewTextBox("Done — press any key to exit.", 600, control.FPoint{X: 0, Y: 0}, control.DefaultTextColor)

	exp.Show(instr)
	exp.Keyboard.Wait()
	exp.Show(hello)
	exp.Keyboard.Wait()
	exp.Show(finish)
	exp.Keyboard.Wait()
}

Run or build examples from within this repository:

cd examples/hello_world
go run .            # fullscreen by default
go run . -d         # windowed 1024×1024 (developer mode)
go run . -d -s 1    # windowed, subject ID = 1
go build .          # build a standalone binary

Run any example directly from the repository root:

go run ./examples/parity_decision/ -d -s 1

Most examples accept -d (windowed 1024×1024 developer mode) and -s <id> (subject ID written to the .xpd data file).

To build all examples at once:

cd examples
./build.sh

Cross-compiling is straightforward in Go — you can build binaries for Windows, macOS, and Linux (Intel or ARM) from any machine.

Project Structure

License

This project is licensed under the GNU Public License v3 - see the LICENSE file for details.

Christophe Pallier, 2026

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