Gustav: Cross-device Cross-computer Synchronization of Sensory Signals

Temporal synchronization of behavioral and physiological signals collected through diferent devices (and sometimes through diferent computers) is a longstanding challenge in HCI, neuroscience, psychology, and related areas. Previous research has proposed to synchronize sensory signals using (1) dedicated hardware; (2) dedicated software; or (3) alignment algorithms. All these approaches are either vendor-locked, non-generalizable, or difcult to adopt in practice. We propose a simple but highly efcient alternative: instrument the stimulus presentation software by injecting supervisory event-related timestamps, followed by a post-processing step over the recorded log fles. Armed with this information, we introduce Gustav, our approach to orchestrate the recording of sensory signals across devices and computers. Gustav ensures that all signals coincide exactly with the duration of each experiment condition, with millisecond precision. Gustav is publicly available as open source software.