Research of Accuracy and Stability on Computer Timing Control in Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience

The present study was intended to investigate the accuracy and stability of computer timing technology applied in behavioral studies. It could also provide suggestions for behavioral researchers and experiment programmers. There were two experiments in this study. In the first experiment, we focused on testing the accuracy and stability of six commonly used computer timing functions. In the second experiment, we focused on the different timer objects in different program languages. The testing results showed that only the multithread techniques could periodically trigger some functions on 1 ms precision, and if the interval was set no less than 8 ms, another function called timeSetEvent could work precisely. There were some suggestions given to the related researchers.