OpenSesame is a tool to create experiments for psychology, neuroscience, and experimental economics.
Copyright, 2010-2025, Sebastiaan Mathôt and contributors.
OpenSesame is a graphical experiment builder. OpenSesame provides an easy to use, point-and-click interface for creating psychological/ neuroscientific experiments.
- A user-friendly interface — a modern, professional, and easy-to-use graphical interface
- Online experiments — run your experiment in a browser with OSWeb
- Python — add the power of Python to your experiment
- JavaScript — add the power of JavaScript to your experiment
- Use your devices — use your eye tracker, button box, EEG equipment, and more.
- Free — released under the GPL3
- Crossplatform — Windows, Mac OS, and Linux
OpenSesame relies on a number repositories that are all hosted by the Cogsci.nl organization on GitHub. The most important of these are:
- opensesame contains core OpenSesame functionality
- rapunzel is a set of extensions that turn OpenSesame into a code editor
- osweb implements OSWeb, the online OpenSesame runtime
- opensesame-extension-osweb embeds OSWeb into the OpenSesame user interface
- pyqode.core implements generic code-editor widgets
- pyqode.python implements Python-specific code-editor widgets
- datamatrix implements a tabular data structure that is used by the
loopitem - qdatamatrix implements a Qt widget for editing datamatrix objects
- pseudorandom implements pseudorandomization/ randomization constraints
Each major version of OpenSesame lives in its own branch. The default branch is currently milgram.
gibson- 2.8heisenberg- 2.9ising- 3.0james- 3.1koffka- 3.2loewenfeld- 3.3milgram- 4.0
- Mathôt, S., Schreij, D., & Theeuwes, J. (2012). OpenSesame: An open-source, graphical experiment builder for the social sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 44(2), 314-324. doi:10.3758/s13428-011-0168-7
- Mathôt, S., & March, J. (2022). Conducting linguistic experiments online with OpenSesame and OSWeb. Language Learning. doi:10.1111/lang.12509
OpenSesame is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License 3. The full license should be included in the file COPYING, or can be obtained from:
OpenSesame contains works of others. For the full license information, please refer to debian/copyright.
Installation instructions and documentation are available on the documentation website ...
... which is itself also hosted on GitHub:
