Trial number from randomseed

[David McFarlane]

Stock reminder:  1) I do not work for PST.  2) PST's trained staff 
take any and all questions at 
http://support.pstnet.com/e%2Dprime/support/login.asp , and they 
strive to respond to all requests in 24-48 hours -- this is pretty 
much their substitute for proper documentation, so make full use of 
it.  3) In addition, PST takes questions at their Facebook page 
(http://www.facebook.com/pages/Psychology-Software-Tools-Inc/241802160683 
), and offers several instructional videos there and on their YouTube 
channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/PSTNET ) (no Twitter feed yet, 
though).  4) If you do get an answer from PST staff, please extend 
the courtesy of posting their reply back here for the sake of others.

That said, here is my take...

Good cautionary tale.  That's why my lesson on "Data Handling In 
Depth" stresses to "Analyze early & often!"

So reading through your plea, I understand that your program did not 
merely fail to log the trial/stimulus order (which would have been 
odd, because by default EP *always* logs *every* List attribute used 
*in presentation order*, whether you want it or not), but failed to 
log any data *at all*.  Is that right?

And I am (figuratively) scratching my balding head trying to figure 
out how you managed to get things logged when giving a response, but 
not for non-responses.  That is really weird.  EP by default logs all 
information at the end of each Procedure, response or not, so I 
cannot imagine how you got rows of data for responses, but not for 
non-responses.  As far as I can figure, you would have to go *way* 
out of your way to turn off the automatic Procedure logging and 
replace it with your own inline code, which would be bad unless you 
*really* knew what you were doing.  So I must be overlooking 
something obvious.  But no matter.

Finally, you said that, "On the list with all the attributes, under 
Logging," you "checked the attributes property name".  Hmm.  By 
default, those Logging attributes already have check marks; if you 
went in and manually "checked" them, then you really unchecked them, 
and that turned off their logging.  But that would mean that they 
would fail to log for both non-responses *and* responses, which does 
not square with your account.  So I am stumped on how you got to this state.

Anyway, that was not your question at all.  As I take it, you merely 
want a mechanism to use the recorded RandomSeed to regenerate the 
presentation order.  Well, the short answer is, if you look around 
the E-Prime Knowledge Base on the PST web site, you will find 
instructions on how to enter a RandomSeed value and have EP run with 
that.  As I recall, it comes down to adding RandomSeed as a 
StartupInfo parameter (I cover StartupInfo parameters in my 
course).  For details, consult the EP KB, or PST Web Support.

-----
David McFarlane
E-Prime training 
online:  http://psychology.msu.edu/Workshops_Courses/eprime.aspx
Twitter:  @EPrimeMaster (twitter.com/EPrimeMaster)



At 3/15/2012 03:23 PM Thursday, you wrote:
>Dear all,
>
>I am quite new to E-prime and I've just realised that the programme
>that I have been using to collect data for the past two weeks hasn't
>been logging the data correctly!
>
>Basically, participants are presented with a series of attributes
>describing four hypothetical apartments (these attributes are
>presented for a fixed time of 4seconds). At the end of it,
>participants are asked to decide which apartment they would like to
>live in.
>I am interested in how the order of presentation of attributes affects
>this final judgement and there were some obvious issues with have a
>fixed order across all participants so we decided to randomise it.
>However, we decided on this with the impression that E-prime would log
>the data of the order in which the attributes appeared (at random). On
>the list with all the attributes, under Logging, I checked the
>attributes property name. I guess I made a huge mistake when I was
>testing the programme because I pressed spacebar to move on to the
>next attribute, and when I looked at the data, the attributes order
>was indeed recorded. I didn't double check if the same would happen if
>no response was made at all, which was the case for all participants
>since they were asked to just read each attribute and the next one
>would appear automatically.
>
>I guess another reason why I didn't realise this mistake earlier was
>because I did get a E-DataAid file after each participant - however,
>there was just one line with the subject, session... and random seed.
>I know this is very far fetched, but I'm wondering if there is any
>chance at all that I could somehow retrieve any form of information
>about the order of trials from the randomseed number?
>
>
>Thank you so much!!

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