Help designing a task

[MarinaM]

Hi,
I am trying to design the following task, and am not sure about the best way to proceed.
I have a scrambled letter task where participants are presented with a string of letters and have to find as many different word combinations out of the letters as they can. I want participants to be able to see the responses they already entered, and also to be able to go back and forth between puzzles as they wish (i.e. they will have 10 minutes to solve as many as they can, but they can go back and forth between puzzles). I am guessing I can do this with custom items, but the difficulty is that I also need, either as participants move from puzzle to puzzle, or at random intervals as they are doing them, to have a prime briefly flash on the screen. I am not sure whether I could do that with custom items. Perhaps I could somehow do it with DirectRT?

Thank you for any suggestions you may have.

Marina

[MarinaM]

I want to use the essay format with the Goback option, but when I enter text and ontinue, when I go back to the essay page, what I wrote previously does not appear - is there a way to change that so that the writing remains there until the end of the questionnaire? I want participants to be able to go back and forth between essay questions and add to or change what they have already written.
Thank you.
Marina

[Trevor Newell]

Hi Marina,

This would definitely be a complicated task. First - I would tag your experiment to give the questionnaire a time limit of 10 minutes.
Second, I would create a main menu screen that contained the 10 separate puzzles to choose from. Selecting a puzzle would skip you forward to that item. A main menu would most likely need to be created by using custom items or a scale response.

You'll also need to use some excel logic throughout the experiment. See the 'Advanced Features' samples for more information.
http://www.empirisoft.com/medialab/help/advanced_features.htm

Having a prime briefly flash on screen between puzzles would definitely be possible - sporadic flashes would be harder. It should be noted that DirectRT can do a better job at flashing images to the user; however it may have a harder time completing the rest of the requirements in a project like this.

Regarding your other question - it is unfortunately not possible in previous versions of MediaLab to save the writing within an essay textbox.
Please let me know if you have any additional questions or if I can help in any way.

Regards,
Trevor