[open] Word sampler and keyboard response timing

seth

I have what is probably a simple fix in my open sesame script. Essentially my loop is:
fixation
word sampler
keyboard response
logger

The problem I'm running up against is if a participant presses a keyboard response before the sound is entirely finished playing, the next sound won't advance. It will wait for the user to press the key again, thus rendering all reaction times pretty useless unless the user waits to press the key after the sound is finished. If I untick "flush pending key presses" this will advance the sound, but log a reaction time of 0 if the user pressed a key before the sound is finished. Is there a way to get around this? I'm using a Mac with OpenSesame 0.25.

Thanks for your help!!

sebastiaan

Hi Seth,

The duration of the sampler/ synth is perhaps a bit counter-intuitive.

There is 'duration = sound' which means that the sampler/ synth will block the experiment until the sound is done playing. I imagine that this is what you have selected, right? For that reason, the keyboard_response will not be called until the sound is finished. If you deselect 'flush pending keypresses' it will still be triggered by old, pending responses, but there will be no timestamp (i.e. rt = 0).

There is also 'duration = 0' which means that the sampler/ synth will not block at all, and simply have the sound playing in the background. This means that the experiment advances right to the keyboard_response, and your problem should be solved.

Does this make sense?

If you have problems with the sound persisting into the next trial, see this post for a way to stop sound playback explicitly.

Good luck!

Sebastiaan