Attentional Blink Script

Hello,

I am trying to create a script to test the attentional blink paradigm. There needs to be 80 trials and in between each trial the participant will need to respond with what they believe the two targets were. The design is as follows:

DDDDDTDDDTDDDDDDDD

Response: T1 = T2 =

Attached is the experiment package of what I have so far. It seems like it is very convoluted that I have 80 events, 80 trials, and 80 blocks. And that’s only half of what I need!

Is there a simpler way to do this?

Thank you, you’re all always so helpful!

Attentional Blink.zip (30.4 MB)

David, the experiment is not organized correctly. The way you have it, a trial is presenting a series of pictures, followed by another trial that simply collects a response. This is tedious, as you pointed out. Another disadvantage is that it makes it impossible to randomize the presentation of trials.

I suggest rebuilding the experiment from scratch. I know that this sounds drastic, but if done correctly, it would take under an hour. Currently, you have 40 stimulus lists, each list containing 18 items. The alternate approach is to have 18 lists, each list containing 40 list items. You can then add 40 more list items without making a single change to the experiment.

In other words:

  • You need a single block
  • You need a single trial
  • You need 18 events in the trial, each event using one of the lists. What will happen is that SuperLab will use the first item from list 1, the first item from list 2, .... and the first item from list 18. You can also make the 18th event collect the response as well.
Not only is this approach a lot less work, but it also makes it easier to see the structure of the experiment, and makes it possible to randomize the presentation of trials.