Enhanced timebase option

I think that it would be very useful to have two new event-level options called something like “Log event onset” and “Log stimulus onset”. These would cause Superlab to make log entries at the beginning of the event and at the onset of the stimulus (that is, at the end of vertical blanking after the stimulus is on the display, or after the sound has started to play).

Also, there could be an option at the experiment level “Log event and stimulus onsets by default”, which would cause all new events to have those checkboxes ticked; if you didn’t want that for some event(s), you could untick either or both checkboxes.

These options, along with the existing “Save cumulative time” experiment-level option, could considerably improve the accuracy of timing measurements, or at least they could improve the experimenter’s confidence in them.

There is currently an option to have SuperLab save a detailed log file, but it is saved separately from the main data file. See Hank’s description of the verbose flag in this post.

Hisham.

Yes

I’ve used that, and it is indeed very useful. However, I was thinking more along the lines of having that information in the regular logfile.

Actually I suppose some of the information could be computed from just the “cumulative time” option and the response times. If you know that the response time was, say, 300 ms and that it occurred at a cumulative time of 80000 ms into the experiment, then you also know that the response interval began at 80000-300 = 79700 ms. And if the response time of the next response in the sequence was 350 ms, with a cumulative time of 80400 ms, then you know that that response interval began at 80400 - 350 = 80050 ms, and that the setup overhead from the end of the previous trial to the beginning of the current trial was 50 ms. So, never mind. I think maybe the information in my suggestion is already accessible from the logfile, at least potentially.

Cheers,
Greg

Technically, the verbose log isn’t saved; it’s just reported in a new window. If you want to save it, you need to copy and paste it into a text file. It’s intended as a debugging feature rather than an experiment detail feature. Ultimately, it’s the second bit of information we use (after the user interface) to help debug an experiment when things aren’t running as expected.