Advice for a newbie...

RuthBrown

Hi all!

Being fairly new to OpenSesame (as in a couple of days experience, mainly playing about with the interface), I hope there's someone out there who can offer this newbie some advice.
In my experiment, participants will need to watch a "facial expression morph", in which 39 .png files (from a neutral face, blending into a fully expressed emotion) will be presented in quick succession (350ms/.png image). The participant's task is to pause the morph as soon as they recognize the emotion via a spacebar command, and then input which emotion they think is being expressed (via a keyboard response). Another spacebar command will then continue the morph, and they will have to provide a final answer when seeing the fully expressed emotion. I'm hoping I can collect data on which image(s) the participant paused on, their inputs when they paused the morph and then their final answer once the morph has finished. This will be done over 36 trials.

Any advice, help or general hints and tips in building this experiment would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much!

eduard

Hi Ruth,

Sorry for the delayed response.

Presenting the morphs themselves could easily be implemented in a standard framework, e.g. sketchpad. Adding the keyboard input (use a text inputform), and the pause/continue routine, could be a little more tricky. If you are familiar with Python coding, I'd recommend you do it with an inline_script (I could also help with the coding).

If you still want to try it first with sketchpads, I'd probably make two loops, one that loops across trials, and another one that loops through the morphs (and in which most of the action happens). In that morph loop, you would start with a sketchpad in which you present the morph for 0 ms, followed by a keyboard response for 350 ms. Next you have the the text input form. Importantly, you have to set it to only be executed if the response is space. So that it is not always presented. In the trial loop you would have the morph loop and another text input form, to one that you present in the end of the experiment to your participants.

Does that get you started?

Eduard