[open] registering and using idiosyncratic stimuli within one experiment
Hi all
I am pretty new to OS and python coding and I am having some difficulties at setting up my experiment - but I guess with a bit of experience and coding skills it should be possible 
Basically, I want to get idiosyncratic stimuli-words from each participant in each session and then use those stimuli words for a (immediately following) reaction time task.
I startet by creating a custom form which shows participants a grid with four quadrants (four .png stimuli files; the four quadrants reflecting positive, negative, ambivalent, and indifferent word category) in a loop. In each cycle, one of the quadrants is highlighted and participants are asked to assign 5 words to each quadrant by using the text_input function at the bottom of the form. (Because of performance issues, I tried to split the text input functions among 5 screens which would result in 5 screens x 4 quadrants)
These stimuli-words provided by participants should then be somehow logged and accessible as stimuli in the next phases of the experiment, some questionnaire screens and in particular in the reaction time task. Here each of the stimuli words provided by the participant should be displayed individually, upon which the respective participant has to make a decision between two keys (e.g. left or right).
My problem, I guess, concerns mainly the way I log the results/stimuli words to make them individually accessible for later use. Do you have any suggestions or is it not clear enough?
Thank you very much in advance!
Pierpaolo
Comments
Hey,
Welcome to the Forum! OpenSesame is pretty easy to use. If you haven't done anything it before, a good starting point might working through some of the tutorials and try to understand why things are like they are.
I am not super familiar with forms myself, but would it help if you split your form in two? In the first one, you present the four images. After clicking on the highlighted one (or after a fixed amount of time) the next form appears. Here, you could add as many text input fields as you want words to be collected. The input of each field you save in a separate variable name, which will be internally available right away, so that you can use them for a reaction time task henceforth. Here it is described how you would add those text fields.
Does this make sense?
Eduard
Edit:
After reading your question again, I realized that my answer is not really to the point. If I understand right, you have the problem that the five associations for each image is overwritten in each of the iteration of the loop, when another quadrant is highlighted, right? In this case you can add an
inline_scriptafter the lasttext_input_form, whose basic task is to copy those five variables to another place, where they won't be overwritten. One way of doing that is by adding them to alist. I hope things got clearer now. If I am still misunderstanding, please correct me.Hi Eduard
Thanks a lot, with your help, I think I figured a way out to make it work! I split the forms so that on each form I show the respective image and one text input field which saves each input as a separate string variable (as you suggested). This works fine.
Unfortunately, text input is still running quite slow. I tried to use a different back-end (i.e. legacy) which is supposed to work faster, but OpenSesame crashes as soon as I run the experiment. I am running OpenSesame on OS X. I would welcome any suggestions on this.
Pierpaolo