occasional skips

[Leisha Wharfield]

    "It's also not possible that participants are accidentally hitting
    the key that moves the slide on as I deliberately chose a key away
    from the keys they are using to respond to the trials (and I don't
    tell them which key it is)."

Do the data bear this out? There are no entries for notaskproc; it never 
launches? Have you tried, during testing, prematurely hitting the key 
that moves the slide on to see what happens? In my experience, if there 
is an unexpected way to proceed through the experiment, subjects will 
find it (& that's probably a good thing, because it leads to refinement).

The key that moves the slide on should only be an allowable response in 
notaskproc, therefore hitting it prematurely should do nothing. Is this 
the case?

Leisha Wharfield
Decision Research
Eugene, Oregon, USA

Caren Frosch wrote:

>
> I'm running an experiment where I have divided a list into four 
> blocks, that is, the list consists of 160 trials and after 40 trials 
> it leaves the list to run another procedure which consists of one 
> slide where participants are told whether or not to generate random 
> numbers during the next block (actually one of 3 procedures: 
> 'taskproc' 'notaskproc', 'endproc'). It's all been running fine. But I 
> have found that for some participants it occasionally skips this step 
> and they therefore end up doing one big block (consisting of 80 
> trials). Has anyone experienced this kind of thing before and do you 
> have any suggestions as to what it might be? Could it be a hardware 
> problem (e.g. the keyboard)?
>
> Any suggestions would be much appreciated as I just can't figure out 
> why it's doing it. When I run through the experiment myself it's 
> always fine. It's also not possible that participants are accidentally 
> hitting the key that moves the slide on as I deliberately chose a key 
> away from the keys they are using to respond to the trials (and I 
> don't tell them which key it is).
>
> Thank you,
> Caren
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-- 
"And then many things happened at the same moment."

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