Adding Trials to NWB Files

NWB allows you to store information about timing information in a structured way. These structures are often used to store information about trials, epochs, or other time intervals in the data.

Creating an NWBFile Object

To add trials, you first need an NWBFile object. The recommended approach is to use the create_nwbfile() method from any data interface or data converter. This method creates an in-memory NWBFile object with the interface’s data already added to it, which you can then modify before writing to disk.

from neuroconv.datainterfaces import YourDataInterface

# Initialize your data interface with the path to your data
interface = YourDataInterface(file_path="path/to/your/data")

# Create an NWBFile object with the interface's data
nwbfile = interface.create_nwbfile()

Adding Trials to the NWBFile

Once you have an NWBFile object, you can add trials to it:

# you can add custom columns to the trials table
nwbfile.add_trials_column(name="trial_type", description="the type of trial")

nwbfile.add_trial(start_time=0.0, stop_time=1.0, trial_type="go")
nwbfile.add_trial(start_time=1.0, stop_time=2.0, trial_type="nogo")

You can also add epochs or other types of time intervals to an NWB File. See PyNWB Annotating Time Intervals for more information.

Writing the NWBFile to Disk

Once this information is added, you can write the NWBFile to disk:

from neuroconv.tools import configure_and_write_nwbfile

configure_and_write_nwbfile(
    nwbfile, nwbfile_path="path/to/destination.nwb", backend="hdf5"
)

This will write the NWB file to disk with the added trials information, and optimize the storage settings of large datasets for cloud compute.