Mouse and sketchpad items

sollago

Hi all!

Although my experiment is not a mouse-tracking study, I have two pressing mouse-related questions and I figured that you would be the experts.

1) How do I make the cursor show up with a sketchpad item? I have a couple of instruction screens (red), and I would like participants to be able to move their cursors around (to get familiar with them). But as soon as I set an item to be a sketchpad item, the cursor gets hidden. How do I make it re-appear?

2) The only way to get the mouse to appear in a sketchpad item is to follow it with a mouse_response collection item (green). But even then, the cursor image flickers so much that my participants may have seizures >.< Has anyone encountered this problem? How did you go about it?

Thanks in advance!

Pascal

Hi sollago,

as this discussion is a general OpenSesame question, I have moved it to the OpenSesame category.

To replicate your problem, it would be very helpful if you could report the OpenSesame version you are using, the backend and the operating system. Besides, how is each sketchpad terminated? Simply after a fixed time interval or after a mouseclick?

Assuming a fixed time interval, I could solve the problem if I set the duration of the sketchpad to 0 and inserted an inline_script directly after the sketchpad. In the run phase, I entered the following code:

my_mouse = Mouse()
my_mouse.show_cursor(show=True)
clock.sleep(ms=5000)

This way, the sketchpad is presented for 5 seconds and the cursor is visible.

Hope this helps!

Best,

Pascal

sollago

Hi Pascal, thanks for your response!

I am using Open Sesame 3.2.4 (Kafkaesque Koffka) and in the general configuration of the study I selected the xpyriment backend (but my understanding is that the mouse uses the legacy backends by default, no?). My operating system is masOS High Sierra 10.13.4.

All my sketchpad screens end with a mouseclick, so unfortunately I could not implement your fix.

Pascal

Hi sollago,
in this case the solution would be as you described, i.e., setting the duration of the sketchpad to 0, following with a mouse_response item making sure that the option Visible mouse cursor is selected.
I am also using OpenSesame 3.2.4 (but on Windows) - and for me the mouse cursor is visible without flickers both for the xpyriment and the legacy backend.
Best,
Pascal

sollago

Oh, that's interesting. Ok, then I will add a mouse_response item after each sketchpad. It seems quite wasteful to do this just to show the cursor but I also haven't found a better fix. Maybe in future versions the "Visible cursor"option could be added to the sketchpad items themselves?

I don't know what to do about the flickering, but I will definitely check whether it occurs on a Windows computer. In the meantime, let's hope my experiment doesn't trigger any epileptic attacks for my participants >.<

Thanks Pascal!