Open Ended Input in E-Prime

[Georg Odenthal]

Hello,

I'm a long time MEL2 user who is currently making the transision to
E-Prime.

I'm working on my first study and I want create a computer
questionnaire with open ended questions. To create an open ended
question I load a slide with the instructions and black frame for the
open ended input box.
Then I add a TextDisplay which collects a keyboard response, that is
in input masks I added the keybord as input device. Then I clicked on
advanced in the response options and set a max count of 20, Flush
Input Buffer to 'yes' and the Termination Response to {ENTER}. On the
collection tab I set the reponse mode to 'alphanumeric' and process
backspace to 'yes'. I also added a display on the screen in the echo
tab, so that the subjects can see what they are typing.

Now everything runs smoothly as long as you don't need to correct your
input. When you type on the backspace the text on the screen
disappears correctly. Unfortunately the maximum number of allowed
characters is decreased instead of increase when I press the backspace
key.
So for example if I enter ten characters and then erase these ten
characters again with backspace the screen will disappear because the
20 characters maximum has been reached.

This looks very much like a bug in E-Studio. Obviously control
characters are registered as regular alphanumeric characters and are
added to the text string. They should either be ignored or just
perform the desired control, e.g. deleting a character from the screen
and from the text variable.

Is there any way to get E-Prime to perform the backspace operation
correctly?

I can probably come up with some E-Basic code to do open ended input
with correct backspace processing, but it would be a lot easier if
there was an E-Object that can also do this correctly.

Does any of you have had similar problems or probably a good solution
for that problem?

Best regards,
 Georg


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Georg Odenthal (Dipl.-Psych.)             University of Konstanz
+49 (0)7531 88-2872                       Department of Psychology
odenthal at soz.psychologie.uni-konstanz.de  Social Psychology and Motivation
http://www.socpsych.uni-konstanz.de       78457 Konstanz, Germany

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