Jumping back and forth between stimuli

[jarvis24]

[edited from support email]

I am in the midst of programming a MediaLab study with lots of jumps and thoughtlisting reponses within it. Each participant comes out with about 150 variables. We want accurate response latencies though...so we thought maybe DirectRT would be better. Is MediaLab timing as accurate as DirectRT? It seems that the output and analysis of a DirectRT file for data like this might be excessively unruly?

Also, (my bigger concern)--I have a list of arguments. Participants choose what argument they want to listen to in random order (i.e. select an argument, program jumps to argument, at the end of the argument it jumps back to the list), but will listen to them all. Our DV is the duration of time between the END of one audio file and the selection of the next audio file. Would either MediaLab or DirectRT be able to give me the time between stimuli?

Thanks for your help!!!!

[jarvis24]

My first thought here is to use MediaLab's WebTracker item type. You could create a simple HTML list with links to pages that play the various sound files. Eiether a Back button could return them to the index after the file plays, or a automatic redirect could return them after n seconds.

The WebTracker item type will track every click and the times at which they occur. All of this with a single MediaLab item and a few simple HTML pages. The timing data would be quite adequate for the kind of task you're talking about.

The timing for thought listings is also just fine in ML. It's really an issue of timing error relative to DV variability. If your RTs are averaging 10 seconds +/- 5 seconds, then the effect of 50-100ms of timing error will be neglible. However, if they average 700ms +/- 200ms, then all of a sudden 100ms becomes very important and DirectRT becomes the easy choice.