[solved] Response to journal editor who questions OpenSesame?

amorphia

Hi!

I got the following comment from a journal editor in response to a manuscript of a study using OpenSesame: "I'm not familiar with OpenSesame; the abstract of the paper you cite and the program's website are mute about its ability to collect response latencies with the same sensitivity as Inquisit. More details are necessary about its technical capabilities (see millisecond.com for details)."

What you recommend I put in the manuscript to give more details about OpenSesame?

Cheers,

Ben

amorphia

Perhaps I should also mention, I used the legacy PyGame back-end.

sebastiaan

Hi Ben,

You could point the editor towards the timing page (see below), which provides all the details. There is also a benchmark experiment in the BRM paper, but that's already a few years old.

• http://osdoc.cogsci.nl/miscellaneous/timing/

You haven't chosen the most temporally precise back-end: legacy is not as good in this respect as psycho and xpyriment. But for reaction-time experiments it's perfectly fine.

But what strikes me about the editor's comment is not so much that he questions the timing (which is a healthy dose of skepticism), but that he appears to promote Inquisit, which is a commercial package. Link to their website included. That seems a bit inappropriate, doesn't it?

Cheers,
Sebastiaan

amorphia

Thanks for the reply Sebastiaan! Very useful to see the BRM paper contains benchmarking - I think this should be sufficient for my purposes. I agree the editor's comments concerning Inquisit were slightly strange - I suppose the most charitable interpretation is that Inquisit is perhaps regarded as an "industry standard" and therefore other platforms should be compared? I don't know...