How to pause an event when participant respond

I will present participants some pictures which include hidden patterns like faces or animals. I have 30 pictures and every picture has 10 degrades which gets easier and easier to see the hidden pattern. I have 30 blocks and 30 trials which of each have 10 events. I will present every event for 5 seconds and participant will respond when (s)he saw the hidden pattern. If (s)he doesn’t respond in 5 seconds, program will automatically present the next event (easier degrade).

I want participant to press “space bar” when he saw the pattern; program will save the RT; but the same picture will remain to be presented till participant respond. Because i’m going to ask them what they saw; and then it will be clear whether it is correct answer or not.

How can i do that? Is it possible to remain presenting the same event until a second response?

Do you need to present feedback if the answer is correct or incorrect?

I ask because it is possible to pause at the picture that happens to be on the screen when they press a key, and you can then ask them what they saw. But it would not be possible to determine if that response is correct or not on the fly (you can always do that when processing the data file).

Answer shouldn’t be correct or incorrect at first respond. They will press the key just as they saw the hidden object. So, they will still see the same event on the screen; but RT timer will stop.

Happy New Year!

I have built a small demo experiment to illustrate how this can be done. The experiment uses five text events instead of pictures, but the idea is the same. The key part is in the Feedback tab: when there is a response, the five events are set to present event “Prompt for answer”.

One needs to be careful when using both “Keyboard-Single Keys” and “Keyboard-String Input” in the same experiment, namely:

  • Both input devices (in the Participant Input dialog, [B]Options[/B] tab) need to look for input [B]Only if an event designates a single key/string input response as correct[/B].
  • Correspondingly, you need to make sure that every event does have a correct response set, otherwise SuperLab will not look for input and the experiment will seem to freeze (you can always press Esc to get back to editing). For “Keyboard-Single Keys”, I created a response that uses the space bar.

I hope this helps.

tn2051.sl4 (6.63 KB)

This is very helpful, thank you. But there is still one thing that i couldn’t figure out. If participants’ answer is incorrect they must see the remaining events in the trial. I’ve added one more trial. For the event “Promt for answer”, i’ve added a new feedback: “if the answer is not correct”–>“present remaining events in the trial”. However, even i don’t type a string response, it still shows the next trial.

tn2051 (autobackup).sl4 (9.07 KB)

That was why I asked earlier if you need to present feedback based on whether the answer is correct or incorrect. :slight_smile:

Unfortunately, it is not possible to do so in SuperLab 4.x. It is possible to do it in SuperLab 5 through the creation of some involved rules.