Design that loops a visual discrimination task while waiting for keyboard input?

[David McFarlane]

Yes, I am having trouble following you, don't 
know if that's me or you, but I have trouble 
following wordy expressions, perhaps if you could 
find some way to reduce, simplify, & clarify your expression...

As far as I can tell, what you want is trivial to 
accomplish.  You should already have your visual 
monitoring "secondary" task log all the relevant 
data, so you are all set there.  For the 
"primary" task, if you simply log a timestamp for 
the first relevant event, and a timestamp for the 
last relevant event, then you may simply subtract 
to get the total elapsed time -- you may do that 
from the data after the run, or with some 
cleverness use inline code to compute and log this directly to the .edat file.

What am I missing?

-- David McFarlane


At 11/21/2013 02:53 PM Thursday, Colton Perry wrote:
>That's a component of what I'm trying to do, but 
>I think the main thing I'd like to accomplish is 
>to be able to record both the RTs and accuracy 
>to responses for the monitoring task while also 
>recording the total time that the trial took 
>place. Maybe I'm thinking about it the wrong 
>way. It seems like it wouldn't be difficult to 
>have a procedure that does one or the other, but 
>I don't know how to get it to do both 
>concurrently. It's important that all of the 
>monitoring responses be tied to each particular 
>text instruction because our goal is to measure 
>the differences in accuracy and RT for the 
>monitoring task as a result of the different primary tasks.
>
>I feel like I'm not being particularly clear, 
>and I apologize for that. We have two tasks that 
>we would like to be recorded. One is performance 
>on the monitoring task, and one is total time 
>for completion of the primary task. So a single 
>"trial" is the onset of the text instructions to 
>the keypress that terminates that set of 
>instructions, and within that trial the visual 
>monitoring task loops until the trial is over. 
>I'm not sure how to get do the two things concurrently.
>
>Am I making this more complicated than it really is?
>
>On Thursday, November 21, 2013 1:28:56 PM UTC-6, McFarlane, David wrote:
>Do I understand correctly that your sticking
>point is only how to keep some constant text on
>the display throughout a series of stimuli &
>responses?  If that's all, I have two solutions:
>
>1) The rookie way:  Add the constant text to all
>of the stimulus displays -- either add the full
>literal text into each display, or put the text
>into an attribute and then use the same atribute
>reference in each display.  You would most easily
>do this using Slides for your display objects.
>
>2) My preferred way:  With judicious use of Frame
>Size and Position, and BackStyle Transparent, you
>may add the constant text to a place on the
>screen that just never gets covered up by subsequent stimuli.
>
>Good luck.
>
>-----
>David McFarlane
>E-Prime training
>online: 
><http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fpsychology.msu.edu%2FWorkshops_Courses%2Feprime.aspx&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNHhJVD3mCfXKdywfB5AgKLPu1OSJg>http://psychology.msu.edu/Workshops_Courses/eprime.aspx 
>
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>
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>
>At 11/21/2013 02:10 PM Thursday, Colton Perry wrote:
> >Hi all, I hope this isn't something I could have
> >easily figured out by a good Google search, I
> >just haven't been able to find the correct
> >search terms to get what I'm going for here.
> >
> >I'm trying to implement a design that's a bit
> >beyond my understanding (most of my experience
> >with e-prime has been mostly pretty
> >straight-forward linear presentation stuff). To
> >boil it down to a single trial, I'd like to
> >present a simple visual search/discrimination
> >task alongside a set of verbal instructions. So
> >for example, at the onset of a trial, a text
> >display would appear providing instructions for
> >a primary task to be performed outside of
> >e-prime (these tasks are performed on a
> >motorcycle infotainment system). A short time
> >after the onset of those instructions, the
> >visual discrimination task would begin. So,
> >leaving the instructions on the display, a
> >letter would appear. If this is a key letter,
> >the participant would respond with a key press
> >(well, a foot pedal mapped to a key press "b",
> >but a key press to Eprime). If it's not a key
> >letter, then the participant does nothing and
> >the letter disappears. The part I'm not sure how
> >to accomplish is that after they respond with a
> >key press, I need the discrimination task to
> >repeat itself on average every 5 seconds (so 5 ±
> >2s) while the text display with the instructions
> >remains the same. After the participant
> >completes the primary task on the motorcycle, a
> >researcher would then press a key to end the
> >trial and move on to the next set of instructions.
> >
> >So it would look something like this:
> >
> >Primary task instruction onset
> >--- key letter appears > foot pedal response >
> >key letter disappears, record RT
> >--- foil letter appears > no response > foil
> >letter disappears after a given time, record response if incorrect
> >--- repeat randomly
> >--- Primary task completed > research presses key > record total trial time
> >Primary task instruction onset
> >etc.
> >
> >Does this make sense? Please let me know if I
> >need to provide more information. I'll keep
> >trying different things in the meantime. Most of
> >my experience with Eprime has been in the gui
> >interface rather than the inline commands, so
> >I'm pretty inexperienced on that end, but I'm definitely willing to learn.
> >
> >Thanks in advance for your time,

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