Updating PsychoPy is generally a positive step towards enhancing your experimental setup, and it’s unlikely to break your existing experiments, especially if you are using the Builder. Here’s why:
Control Over Versioning with ‘Use Version’ Setting: PsychoPy gives you control over which version you run your experiment with, thanks to the ‘Use Version’ setting in the experiment settings. This feature allows you to specify a particular version of PsychoPy for each experiment, ensuring compatibility and stability, even after updating the software.
Advantages of Using Builder: Experiments created with PsychoPy’s Builder are especially robust against version updates. The Builder’s graphical interface abstracts much of the underlying code, making experiments less prone to issues related to code changes in new versions. This means your experiments are more likely to run smoothly, even after an update.
Benefits of Updating: Updating PsychoPy brings you the latest features, performance improvements, and bug fixes, enhancing the overall functionality and user experience. New versions often include optimized components, new capabilities, and improved efficiency, which can significantly benefit your experimental design and data collection.
Continued Compatibility and Testing: While updates aim for backward compatibility, it’s good practice to test your experiments after updating. This ensures everything runs as expected. The community and developers continually work to maintain compatibility across versions, so you can update with confidence.
Enhanced Performance and Features: Each update to PsychoPy not only aims to fix known issues but also introduces new functionalities that can make your experiment design more efficient and effective. Leveraging these new features can lead to more sophisticated experimental designs and smoother execution.