I have a SuperLab program I designed this summer that deals with over 300 sound files and having an image appear on the screen and varying durations after the audio file starts. We were going to start testing this program next week and now I cannot get SuperLab to open the program properly. SuperLab seems to hang up and when I go to Force Quit, it says the program is not responding.
I was wondering if I unknowingly surpassed a limit of what SuperLab can handle?
I was able to open and manipulate the program files yesterday and earlier today, but now I can no longer open the old copies of the original program dated in September or the new ones. I have tried this on multiple machines in our lab and encounter the same issue. I have rebooted my machine multiple times, but it does not help.
I am running SuperLab on a Mac Pro PPC and on Mac Pro Intel machines.
There is no internal limit to SuperLab other than your computer’s available memory. It’s hard to tell without seeing the experiment. For example, is the memory preference set to loading stimulus files For only one trial at a time? (under Experiment menu > Options > Memory Management). Are all 300 events part of the same trial causing them to be all loaded at once?
I have found that if I let SuperLab just chug away loading the program file it will eventually load. It just takes much longer than the majority of our experiments.
In answer to your questions:
Yes, the memory preference is set to loading stimulus files For only one trial at a time.
I have over 300 trials in a block in a specific random order. Each trial contains 5 or 6 events in the following sequence:
show text of +
display empty text field and wait a delay
play sound file
display empty text field and wait a delay
present a picture
display empty text field and wait for microphone input from subject
display scoring info and wait for scoring from experimenter
This was one of the first experiments I worked on so the set up isn’t as ideal as my subsequent experiments.
For example I would now use the ISI instead of an empty text field that waits a duration. Could this be what is causing my loading problems?
I doubt that using a text field is what’s causing the loading problems, but using an ISI instead is a good idea. Using the text field is not without its issues, e.g. it needs to be used carefully if combined with the Keyboard-Single Keys input or the Mouse input to avoid conflicts. Also, edit fields do not work well with time limits.