I’m using 4.07b with a touch screen system for monkeys. I am presenting a series of stimuli to a subject, each of which has to be touched to advance the series to the next stimulus. All stimuli stay on the screen throughout the trial. At the end of the series the subject has to classify the series as either A or B (correct or incorrect; A and B are stimuli that come up after the last element in the series comes on and is responded to). If A is correct, and the subject touches A, then it receives food. If it presses B, I go to a dark screen, which I do using the feedback function, “Response is not correct.”
All of this is easy enough to program. But, I find that when the subject touches one of the series of stimuli (which I want to remain on the screen while the monkeys are making a choice) while A and B are on the screen, that response is also treated as an incorrect response, and the program goes to the dark screen. It appears that Superlab treats any designated response location other than the one designated as correct, to be part of the incorrect response.
I’ve tried erasing the screen before A and B come up, but still, responses to those other response locations (which monkeys tend to do) end the trial and produce the dark screen. I can eliminate touches to non-designated areas of the screen using one of the response options, “ignore a mouse click . . .”
Is there a way to uniquely designate a particular location as “incorrect” (as you can for a correct response), so that only a response to that area will produce the end of the trial?
There is no way to explicitly designate a particular response as correct. But the option that you mentioned, Ignore a mouse click unless it falls inside an area defined as a response, should do the trick. But turning this option On, the issue of the subject touching one of the series of stimuli goes away because SuperLab will not even evaluate a mouse click for correctness unless the monkey taps response A or response B. And if you designate A as correct, B is automatically the incorrect one.
Please let me know if I misunderstood the question; I’ll be happy to follow up.
The function “Ignore a mouse click unless it falls inside an area defined as a response” doesn’t seem to work that way. It eliminates touches to non-designated areas of the screen, but if an area has been designated as a response, even if nothing is presented in that area, a touch to that area ends the trial, when I’m using the feedback function “Response is not correct.”. So, it appears to work this way: If A is correct, a response to ANY designated response area other than A will invoke the feedback function.
IOW, it isn’t just touches to A or B during their presentation that will end a trial (with either food or a dark screen), it is a touch to any area of the monitor that has been designated as a response area. One way around this would be to allow response areas to be de-selected during particular events, but this doesn’t seem possible. Once an area has been designated as a response area, it is “live” for any event in the program.
Alas, I don’t see a way around this for now. The method that I described works if you have only two responses, A and B. But if you have multiple ones, then all of them except A will be treated as incorrect.
We’ll what we can do about this in a future version.