My First Project

[Michiel Spape]

Hi Atieh,
Are you seriously asking someone to do your entire project? If so, don't forget to say how much you pay :) 
If not, you might be better off (if you want help) by telling exactly where you got stuck. I mean, it would be pretty odd if I go to the microsoft office mailinglist asking "I need to write a best-selling thriller using Microsoft Word. Please describe each step of this task for me?". Also, it is pretty hard to say, even in response to this, anything of help if the community as such does not know your level of competence. "Dear Sir, in order to work successfully with MS Word, please take hold of your Microsoft Mouse. The Mouse has two buttons..." and so on, will take a bit more effort than even the most hardcore of board-members are willing to give (unless paid by the hour). 
That's a long story, but the answer is short: 
1 first learn E-Prime (getting started guide, user manual, or that e-primer book which has been taken down recently (but i'll do something about it ASAP, possibly turning it into a blog)
2 try your hand at making the experiment
3 note carefully where you get stuck, what you don't understand
4 search the mailinglist and/or forum online as a number of typical problems can easily be solved
5 finally, ask your question here, or over at PST.

I do not imagine you can finish writing an experiment like i could finish my handiwork-knitting back when i was 6 and asked the teacher, in utter despair, to please tell me once again how they did it :)
Cheers,
Mich (whose cobwebs of network-, power- and audio-cables suggest he should have paid more attention!)

Michiel M. Spape
Research Fellow
University of Nottingham


-----Original Message-----
From: e-prime at googlegroups.com on behalf of Atieh
Sent: Thu 8-7-2010 15:25
To: e-prime at googlegroups.com
Subject: My First Project
 
Hi all
I am college student and I have an internship in N.I.H . I really need 
to learn E_prime , but I can not make my first task right and I don't 
know which steps I did wrong . Can somebody describe each step of this 
task for me ? I would be grateful if somebody help me . This is the task :


Multitask Badre Wagner Neuron 2004




Figure 1. Task Schematic Depicting the Order and Timing of Events during 
Each Trial and Illustrating the Four Conditions at Response

(A) All trials began with the serial presentation of three words 
followed by a bias cue. Subjects used this cue to select or prepare the 
expected response. Following a 3000 ms delay, a response cue was 
presented in red. The subject was given 1500 ms to respond. There were 
two types of Response cues, with each cueing either an Expected or 
Unexpected response, resulting in four conditions at response.

(B) When a word (Repeat) cue was presented at response, subjects 
covertly repeated the word and pressed a button. On 75% of Repeat 
trials, the word cued the Expected response; on the remaining 25% of 
trials, the response was Unexpected.

(C) When a number (Refresh) cue was presented, subjects covertly 
repeated the word from the memory set that corresponded to that number 
in ordinal position (e.g., "2" cued the second word). Again, on 75% of 
the trials the number cued the Expected response, and on 25% of the 
trials the response was Unexpected.


On each trial, a 3 s delay followed presentation of the bias cue, and 
then a final response cue was presented to signal the target response to 
be immediately executed (Figure 1A). The response cue signaled either 
the expected or an unexpected response---a manipulation of response 
selection demands. Moreover, the cue stimulus either directly mapped 
onto a response or required access to recently active representations 
within working memory---a manipulation of refresh and 
subgoal/integration demands. These conditions and their implications for 
control processing are further detailed below.
The sensitivity of PFC to "response selection" demands was tested by 
arranging a mismatch on conflict trials between the expected response, 
based on the bias cue, and the cued response (Figure 1B). On half of the 
trials, the response cue was a word (Repeat cue), and subjects were 
instructed to covertly repeat the word and press a button once having 
done so. The word was always one of the three words from that trial's 
memory set. Furthermore, 75% of the time the Repeat cue, and thus the 
response, was the same as the word that had been expected based on the 
bias cue presented prior to the delay and so was consistent with the 
Expected response (i.e., no response conflict). For the remaining 25% of 
Repeat trials, the response cue corresponded to one of the other words 
in the memory set, thus requiring an Unexpected response. Accordingly, 
during Unexpected trials, the prepared or prepotent response was 
incongruent with the response signaled by the response cue. Hence, 
analogous to the Stroop task, Repeat-Unexpected trials required 
selection of a response pathway based on bottom-up visual input in the 
face of a task-irrelevant, prepotent response (although, in contrast to 
Stroop, here the prepotent response was established by a top-down bias 
or selection process engaged upon presentation of the bias cue rather 
than a learned preexperimental association). Thus, for Repeat trials any 
sensitivity of PFC to expectation would reflect response conflict and 
response selection demands.
To test the sensitivity of PFC to refresh and subgoaling/integration 
demands, we devised two additional conditions in which response conflict 
was present or absent in the face of a need to execute a subgoal 
entailing the integration of two cues, and to subsequently refresh a 
recently active representation (Raye et al., 2002). Specifically, in the 
Refresh condition, the response cue entailed a symbolic stimulus that 
required retrieval of a representation from within working memory, with 
some trials requiring an expected response and others requiring an 
unexpected response (Figure 1C). During the half of all events that were 
Refresh trials, the response cue was a number (Refresh cue), rather than 
a word. As with the bias cue, the Refresh cue referred to the ordinal 
position of one of the words. In response to the Refresh cue, subjects 
were to covertly repeat the corresponding word that was cued by the 
number (Raye et al., 2002) and to press a button once having done so. 
Hence, differential sensitivity to this condition over the Repeat 
condition might reflect processes engaged to refresh a recently active 
representation within working memory. Importantly, Refresh trials 
further required subgoaling/integration because the symbolic response 
cue had to be specified prior to response selection. That is, Refresh 
trials necessitated that the response cue be compared/integrated with 
the bias cue to determine if the prepared response was or was not the 
target response. This integration stage entailed execution of a subgoal 
en route to satisfying the global goal of executing a response 
independent of whether the response was expected or not, a distinction 
that differentiates this integration process from the hypothesized 
refresh process. Hence, to the extent that a region of PFC is engaged in 
refreshing, it should principally reveal a difference between 
Refresh-Unexpected and Repeat-Unexpected. Whereas, if a region of PFC is 
critical for subgoaling/integration, it should be sensitive to the need 
to Refresh regardless of whether the response is expected or unexpected, 
because both conditions require subgoaling and integration.
In addition to the main effects of refreshing and 
subgoaling/integration, response conflict was also manipulated within 
the Refresh condition. As in the Repeat condition, for 75% of Refresh 
trials the number cued the same word as had been indicated by the bias 
cue, and so the response was Expected even though the representation 
cueing the response (a symbolic cue) differed from the prepared 
representation (the response word). For the remaining 25% of Refresh 
trials, the number cued one of the other two words, and so the response 
was Unexpected. Thus, as with the Repeat-Unexpected condition, the 
Refresh-Unexpected condition required a response in the presence of 
conflict from the prepared but irrelevant response.




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