goxpyriment

Memory for Binary Sequences

Replication of Experiment 1 from Planton et al. (2021), which investigates how humans memorise and detect violations in binary auditory sequences. The experiment provides evidence for a mental compression algorithm: sequences that can be described by a short recursive rule are learned more easily and reproduced more accurately.

The experiment has two parts:

1. Complexity rating (30 trials): listen to each of 10 binary sequences and rate its complexity on a 1–9 scale.
2. Violation detection (10 sessions): the sequence repeats; press Space whenever a deviant tone is heard.

Stimuli

Each sequence is 16 items long, built from two complex tones (low and high pitch, randomly assigned to items A and B per session). Tones are 50 ms with 5 ms ramps; ISI = 200 ms; ITI = 600 ms. Deviant tones replace an expected tone with a “super-deviant” pitch level.

Running

go run main.go          # fullscreen
go run main.go -d       # windowed (development)
go run main.go -d -s 1  # windowed, subject ID 1

Flags

Flag	Default	Description
-d	off	Development mode: windowed 1024×768
-s	0	Participant ID

Controls / Response keys

Key	Meaning
1–9	Complexity rating (part 1)
Space	Violation detected (part 2)
Escape	Quit

Output

Data are saved to goxpy_data/ as a .xpd file. One row per trial event, recording phase, sequence ID, trial type (standard / deviant / super-deviant), deviant position, response, and RT.

References

Planton, S., van Kerkoerle, T., Abbih, L., Maheu, M., Meyniel, F., Sigman, M., Wang, L., Figueira, S., Romano, S., & Dehaene, S. (2021). A theory of memory for binary sequences: Evidence for a mental compression algorithm in humans. PLoS Computational Biology, 17(1), e1008598. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008598

This site is open source. Improve this page.