Trials missing occasionally & microphone input Q

Hi all,

We have two (unrelated) questions about one of our current experiments:

  1. Trials missing occasionally when running experiment

We just set up an experiment with a slightly complicated structure: We have two stimuli lists (“Fillers” and “Controls”) from which we are selecting 3 random stimuli several times throughout the experiment (in the attached mini-version only twice) without repeating any stimulus item. These stimuli from the stimuli lists are interspersed with the critical “target” items (not selected from one of the stimuli lists), blocks “He Do” and “He Do 1” in the attached mini-experiment.

The experiment works great EXCEPT that every once in a while, the second block of fillers and/or controls (“rep 2”) will only select 2 instead of 3 trials! This is pretty random, but usually the program selects all 3 necessary trials after closing and reloading SuperLab. In rare circumstances, it will also select all 3 trials when we run the experiment again (without closing and staring SuperLab again). Usually, though, the program will select 2 “Fillers” and 3 “Controls” or vice versa (3 “Controls” and 2 “Fillers”) - and often the program will only select 2 of each the “Fillers” and the “Controls” when we run the experiment a couple of times in a row.

Again, trials are only missing in the second part of the experiment (when we access the controls/fillers for the second time, “rep 2”), never in the first part (“rep 1”) of the experiment.

Do you have any idea what might cause this and/or how we might be able to avoid this issue?

  1. Microphone input

We would also like to record responses form our participants via a microphone. The experiment will take place on a Mac computer. We would like to record the actual answer as well as RT. We have checked “Microphone Input” under Experiment>Participant Input. So far, our data file either shows no responses (and 0 ms RT) or hundreds of rows with similar RT numbers (and no file of the recording?). We’ve tried both the microphone jack and USB port.

Thank you so much for your help!

problem_exp.sl4 (11.2 KB)

SuperLab Data File_ex.txt (3.78 KB)

For the trials, the number of times a trial has been presented is experiment wide, it is not on a per block basis. A work around is to duplicate the trials. See the attached experiment. Also, a macro was created to reset some variables.

For the microphone input question, we will be posting a tech support note about this in the next couple of weeks. The most frequent problem has to do with participants speaking to long and continuing to speak after SuperLab has moved onto the next trial. The best approach would be to use a key press to move to the next trial.

problem_exp(2) rev B2.sl4 (12.2 KB)