Showing input sentences

researcher
New Member

Posts: 12

Showing input sentences Jan 9, 2022 0:30:24 GMT

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Post by researcher on Jan 9, 2022 0:30:24 GMT

I'd like to show five input sentences, each of which is made up of a statement and a question, e.g.

(1) "John gives Mary a ball. What does John give?"

Then the participant has to read it and press a key to continue after reading. After that, there will be three answers to choose from and the choice has to be made within, say five seconds.

(2) "A. John B. Mary C. a ball"

I want to record the time from reading (1) to pressing the key to continue, and choosing the answer of (2).

Following problems have popped up:

a. Sentence (1) seems to be too long to be displayed. Is there a way that it can be split into two halves so it can fit the screen, e.g. the first part on the top and second below it?
b. How can I code the part, where (1) will be shown first, and by pressing a button, (2) will appear? And then the next input sentence will be shown, and so on and so forth?

I'd appreciate your help.

Last Edit: Jan 9, 2022 0:36:27 GMT by researcher

reed
New Member

Posts: 6

Showing input sentences Jan 11, 2022 3:34:02 GMT

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Post by reed on Jan 11, 2022 3:34:02 GMT

By default text will appear at x and y co-ordinates 0 0 (i.e. center of the screen), but you can specify whatever co-ordinates you want. Thus, if you want to split your sentence into two parts, you can simply split it across two different 'show' commands, and specify the position you want them to be in, so that one is on top of the other. Alternatively, you can create an image out of the text you want to display and show that on-screen instead.

For your second question, there's multiple ways to do this. If you want to do this within a task, I suggest you check the documentation on readkey to get the computer to wait for a keypress. After this point, you can use the "clear screen" command to remove the previous sentence from the screen, and then use new commands to display your next stimulus. Alternatively, if you code your "show" commands within the block, instead of the task, there is a "wait_for_key" command that will wait for the user to press spacebar before continuing on to the next line of code.

PsyToolkit
Administrator

Posts: 547

Showing input sentences Feb 4, 2022 11:53:07 GMT

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Post by PsyToolkit on Feb 4, 2022 11:53:07 GMT

This is not difficult. If you have fairly long sentences, it is easiest to use the new textbox function, as in some examples:

www.psytoolkit.org/experiment-library/pacedreading2.html

In your case, I would do it along these lines.

table mine

"John gives Mary a ball. What does John give?" "A. John B. Mary C. a ball" 3

"Claudia gives John a cookie. What does Claudia give?" "A. Cookie B. John C. a ball" 1

task mytask

keys a b c space

textbox new 0 0 700 400

textbox 1 lock

textbox 1 text @1

readkey 4 5000

set &rt_reading RT

textbox 1 text @2

readkey @3 10000

save &rt_reading RT STATUS