Displaying and collecting responses from two objects at the same time

[Paul Gr]

Hello Joseph,

I think this should be possible though. To start with, you could place the 
sound object before the stimulus object and set the duration to zero. You 
would also have to set the ‘stopafter’ property to ‘no’ to prevent immediate 
termination of the sound itself. Then add an input object such as a keyboard 
and set the time limit to the duration of the required time window (i.e. 
2000). You can add the stimulus object (with duration 200) and an empty text 
object (duration 1800) after the sound object. That should do the trick.

There is only one thing that could be a bit tricky: By default the end 
action property of the input object is set to ‘terminate’. This could be a 
problem because only the active object will be terminated. If the response 
occurs during playback of the stimulus (rt<200), then only the stimulus will 
be terminated and the second object (empty screen for 1800ms) will be played 
as usual. A bit of scripting could solve this.

best,
Paul



>From: "Joseph Williams" <joseph.williams at utoronto.ca>
>To: eprime at mail.talkbank.org
>Subject: Displaying and collecting responses from two objects at the same 
>time
>Date: Wed, 9 Aug 2006 14:00:54 +0200
>
>I am modifying an experiment where two objects are used at the same time.
>One is a soundout object that plays a tone and then collects the timed
>response to that tone (it lasts for about two seconds). The other is either
>a textdisplay or slide object that shows a word for 200-500 msecs. The way
>the program is set up now it's not possible to show the text (using either 
>a
>textdisplay or a textdisplay on a slide object) and play the tone (using a
>soundout object), at exactly the same time.
>
>For the tone to collect a response over a period of 2000 msecs it seems 
>that
>the duration of the soundout object has to be set to be 2000 msecs (I may 
>be
>wrong here), so if the tone is played first the textdisplay will only be
>shown after 2000 msecs. Similarly if the textdisplay is loaded first (e.g.
>for 200 msecs) the tone is delayed by 200 msecs. If the textdisplay is
>loaded on a slide (with duration 0 msecs) and then the tone is loaded as a
>soundout object at the same time, there isn't a way to clear the text from
>the screen after 200 msecs. If I put both the textdisplay and the soundout
>object in the same slide, I could use the slide to collect the response to
>the tone, except that then there's no way to clear the word after 200 
>msecs.
>
>There are some ratches I tried to get this to work, but they're not
>completely satisfactory. It seems to be a natural thing to use two objects
>at the same time or to use two objects in overlapping time intervals,
>without having to load them sequentially- the sequential loading means that
>an object cannot be loaded while another object is still in action. Is 
>there
>a way to use both a soundout object and a textdisplay (or slide) object at
>the same time, without forcing the loading of one of these objects to wait
>until the other's duration has been completed?
>
>Thanks in advance,
>
>Joseph Williams