Randomly present one of two alternatives for a long list of questions
Randomly present one of two alternatives for a long list of questions
I have a list of about 60 questions. They are presented in random order. I also have two forms of each question, and I would like MediaLab to randomly select one form of each question. The only way I've figured out to do this is to have blocks for each question of the two forms and a blank instruction screen. I have it randomly select between the question forms and then skip to the instruction screen to prevent it from presenting both forms of the question.
The problem is that the shortest duration for the instruction screen is 1 second. Each question is quite short, so a 1 second delay between each one is really noticeable and irritating. Is there any better way to do this?
There is a new function that can help you with this. So, as you know, you can assign each of the pairs the same BGR value (1 and 1, 2 and 2, 3 and 3,..., 59 and 59, 60 and 60). This will randomize the order of the 60 pairs. Then you assign the WGR values in an identical fashion to randomize the two items within each pair.
Before, you would have to work out something using blank items that had a fixed position in order to handle the skipping of the unused items. Now you can avoid that using the following new function as of v2006.2.39:
Instead of having to explicitly name the variable you want to skip to, you can simply enter +1, +2, +3, +n, etc. items. MediaLab will automatically skip that many items without needing to know the name of a "skipto" variable--it will simply resume wherever it ends up. This is especially nice when the item being skipped to might be randomly determined. So in your case, simply assign a skipto value of +1 to all of your items. I think that ought to do it. If you are successful in doing this, it would be great if you could post the que file here (as an attachment) to help illustrate this method!
Hmm. Interesting. I'll try this out and let you know how it works!
