Nested list galore

[Cognitology]

Hi all,

Today, I was particularly pleased about how far one can take the whole
nested list approach to attributes. The following is rather difficult to
manage in other ways (though that's always uncertain given the many strange
possible ways to reach the same goal), and is something that is quite often
asked in the mailinglist. 

The goal is to take 2 items from a list of N items, assign target status to
one of them and order them randomly.

We take:

1 ItemList, nested inside a high level (say, "sessionlist"). It contains 6
items ("topics"): cat, wife, wine, society, painting and atom (randomized),
in the attribute "Tops".

In the TrialList, I have as a Nested list: "TargetTopic", with a single
attribute "TTopic", 2 levels.

In the TrialList, I have 5 attributes: "Topic1", "Topic2", Topic", "T1N",
"T2N"

T1N and T2N have the following levels

0,1

2,3

4,5

And denote the topic to take (if the ItemList were unsorted, 0 would be cat,
5 atom)

 

Now, Topic1 has, at each of the 3 levels, but each says: [Tops:[T1N]] while
Topic2 has 3 level and each says: [Tops:[T2N]]

They could, of course, just have stated [Tops:1] [Tops:2] and so on, but
this makes recoding much easier (for instance, if more topics are added). 

 

Finally, the Topic attribute denotes a target topic with the single
[Topic[TTopic]]

Which thus uses the nested list (with TTopic being either 1 or 2) to
indicate the "target", such that this item is either [Topic1] or [Topic2].

 

Thus, with this arrangement, it is particularly easy to then show the two
paired words in the experiment, with textdisplay1 and 2, sequentially
calling [Topic1][Topic2].

 

As one can see, and as has been pointed out before by David McFarlane on
this list, one can be extremely creative with the whole square brackets
thing. I was surprised, however, to learn just how very adaptive this can
make the randomization, as in the following samples of a single (literal)
cell in a list:

[Topic1][Topic2] concatenates by drawing from Topic1 and Topic2

[Tops:[T1N]] draws row obtained from nested attribute T1N from Tops

[Topic[TTopic]] concatenates Topic with attribute TTopic, and thus draws
either from Topic1 or Topic2.

 

I suppose one has to be a bit of an e-prime geek to get a thrill from doing
this, but I hope this account may inspire some people anyway.

 

Best,

Michiel

 

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