Randomise blocks in v5?

Can you randomise the order of blocks in Superlab 5?

You can use Participant Groups to accomplish this behavior, which is found under the Experiment menu within SuperLab. For example, you can have 3 groups that all see 100% of the blocks, but each group sees the blocks in a different order.

When creating the groups you need to manually shuffle the blocks into the desired order. You can do this for as many groups as you wish. Attached is a demo experiment that has 3 groups, and each group runs through the blocks in a different order.

participant_groups_reordering_blocks.sl5 (4.73 KB)

Thanks. That helps a bit but I have four blocks that I want to randomise for every participant.

Based on your example I would need to create the 24 different combinations and then run one of those at random for each participant. I assume that’s the best Superlab can offer which isn’t great. Especially as I actually have 4 repetitions of blocks within the same experiment that all need to be randomised!

I’m thinking if I use Superlab I will have to use the 24 combinations method and run it four times per participant.

Unless I’m missing something?

Thanks again.

It would be helpful if you can post your experiment so I can get a better idea how it’s set-up. Please post your experiment as an Experiment Package. This can be found under the File menu within SuperLab.

I’ve not set the experiment up yet. I’m just looking at feasibility. It looks like it can’t be done ‘properly’ using Superlab so I’ll probably use E-Prime. That’s a shame given we’ve recently bought 30 SuperLab licenses!

The concept is simple. There are 16 blocks of trials. The blocks are grouped into 4: blocks 1-4, blocks 5-8, blocks 9-12 and blocks 13-16. The order of blocks within each group has be randomised.

For the first group of 4 blocks there are 24 different combinations:

{1,2,3,4} {1,2,4,3} {1,3,2,4} {1,3,4,2} {1,4,2,3} {1,4,3,2} {2,1,3,4} {2,1,4,3} {2,3,1,4} {2,3,4,1} {2,4,1,3} {2,4,3,1} {3,1,2,4} {3,1,4,2} {3,2,1,4} {3,2,4,1} {3,4,1,2} {3,4,2,1} {4,1,2,3} {4,1,3,2} {4,2,1,3} {4,2,3,1} {4,3,1,2} {4,3,2,1}

Likewise there are 24 combinations for the second group, 24 for the thirs, and 24 for the final group. That makes 96 different ways to run the experiment and would require 96 different Participant Groups to be set up.

In addition we would need to allocate participants to one of the variations at random which would have to be done outside of Superlab.

This is all a bit messy and time consuming.

Superlab really needs a randomise blocks feature!

Sorry if that sounds a bit negative. I do appreciate your help Monika.

Your feedback has been noted. We will keep it in mind for future releases.