Suppressing Min-Max Feedback Messages?
Suppressing Min-Max Feedback Messages?
[edited from support email]
Hi. You have helped me in the past with technical issues. I am finally starting to master DirectRT but have not been able to figure out one issue I need to solve for the task I am currently designing for a research study that is supposed to begin later this week. Everything works fine for the trials for which subjects are supposed to respond, but for some trials, only distractors are presented, and subjects are not supposed to respond. I noticed there is a way to program rt:-1 with a clear400! to indicate no response, remove the stimulus after 400 ms, and automatically advance to the next trial after the minmax is exceeded, but my problem seems to be that I am not using any minmax on those trials – because I don’t want to have a message that the subject needs to respond faster if they exceed the minmax (in my case minmax would be something like 200-2500) – I already have custom feedback messages I have programmed in. So here is my question: is there any way other than with minmax to use the rt:-1 option OR is there some way to use minmax and ! but suppress the automatic message (in case they are too slow on other trials)?
Yes, you can supress those automatic feedback messages by enter a value of '0' in the delay field (located in the Style File > Options). That will tell DirectRT to skip the messages if the time boundaries are broken. Let me know if that doesn't do the trick.
-Blair
That sounds worth trying. However, i am not sure if it will be that simple, because the program does not use simple "rt:79" values in the Time column. Rather, it is designed to use custom rt fields that are stored in separate text files called rt1.txt and rt3.txt and that provide separate feedback based upon response latency and maintains a running total number of points or money earned. I tried writing a new custom file (rt4.txt) with #1,-1 -- but the problem is that for "no response" people are not supposed to earn points -- they are just supposed to get no feedback -- and then for responses, they are supposed to lose a point from the cumulative total being tracked. I am enclosing an example of one of these files (which works fine for cases in which people are supposed to respond) in case that helps to indicate how i should proceed:
#1,44,45,46
#2,79,80,81
1,1,00000,02000,Left: Correct! +3 points,+3
1,1,02001,03000,Left: Correct! +2 points,+2
1,1,03001,05000,Left: Correct! +1 point,+1
1,1,05001,10000,Left: Too Slow!-1 point,-1
1,0,00000,10000,Left: Wrong! -1 point,-1
2,1,00000,02000,Right: Correct! +3 points,+3
2,1,02001,03000,Right: Correct! +2 points,+2
2,1,03001,05000,Right: Correct! +1 point,+1
2,1,05001,10000,Right: Too Slow!-1 point,-1
2,0,00000,10000,Right: Wrong! -1 point,-1
*
style5,3000ms
#1,5,20
#2,50,20
Total Score: <SUM> points, 30,60
Thanks for any input you can proivde.
Oh that really complicates it. I wrote that as a specialty function for Yana a LONG time ago and it doesn't really allow for all the usual DirectRT functions. Basically the program branches off and runs a bunch of custom code and then comes back when it's done. If you zip and send me your experiment folder (without stimuli) I'll run it here and see if there is anything I can suggest.
