Working with an undergraduate honors thesis student and we’re having an issue with selecting from participant groups using an exported Superlab Remote experiment. We’ve created two different participant groups (named Order1 and Order2 in order to randomize the order of blocks across participants). When I run the experiment, I get a warning that says “The participant group that you specified, Main Group, does not exist. Would you like to use the group Order1 instead?” This works – can run all the way through the experiment and it saves the data file to the desktop as “Task Data.txt”.
If I select the option “no” in response to this prompt, I’m given the window in which to enter Session ID, participant name, and select the participant group from a drop-down menu, where I can access both order 1 and order 2. This appears to work – allows me to run all the way through the experiment with the blocks displayed in the selected order – but the data file does not save to the desktop (or anywhere else as far as I can tell).
Would love to know if there’s a way to use the participant groups within superlab remote, rather than generating separate files for each randomization order and counterbalancing the versions sent to participants.
When you select “no” and then you get a dialog where you can enter Session ID, etc., that’s actually a bug, not a feature!
Broader point: on one hand, quite frankly, we missed participant groups when we created SuperLab Remote. On the other hand, SuperLab Remote is meant to run without any further input from the participant, so asking them to specify a group goes counter to that idea.
In fact, we are working on a major revision to SuperLab Remote where our focus is on minimizing the number of steps for a researcher to create and share a Remote package and further minimizing the number of steps for the participants.
We have an idea for an elegant solution on how to handle groups, but it will take some time to implement. Please “pardon our dust”, as they say. We will get it right.
Just a follow up that I ran into the same problem. I’ve since separated the groups into two remote programs but now neither program is saving the data file. I haven’t spent time working through the issue yet, but hope to find a solution (ideally without restarting from scratch!!) since we haven’t had this problem with single group experiments. One thing I suspect… if the default name for the single group in an experiment is “Main Group” it may be that the group name is the problem. When we made the two-group version, the groups had names related to the counterbalancing and when I separated the programs, I just copied them and deleted the extra group, so the single group name was still the cbal group name. When we try to run the version with only one group, it gives us the same warning that emilybl received “The participant group that you specified, Main Group, does not exist…” so I suspect that it is looking for that group name as a default.
If I don’t find the solution… I’ll be back with more specific questions.
I have a bit of news to wet your appetite a little.
We will be launching this summer a replacement for SuperLab Remote called SuperLab Cloud. It will make the entire experience easier both for you (the experiment creator) and for participants.
One of the new features in SuperLab Cloud is the ability to select the participant group. Better yet: SuperLab Cloud can pick a group at random.
If SuperLab Remote is registered to your name, you will be receiving an email soon asking if you would be interested in helping us test SuperLab Cloud.
