Presentation pauses and returns to beginning in middle of experiment

stoney

Hi, I'm having a weird issue where, in the middle of an experiment, Open Sesame suddenly switches to showing the editor and minimises the experimental presentation window. When I maximise the experiment window, it shows the participant instruction screen, i.e. the experiment has gone back to the beginning. The Python console says the experiment has been paused.

I thought perhaps the participant accidentally hit Escape, but usually this would trigger the presentation of "The experiment has been paused. Press the spacebar to continue or Q to quit." and this wasn't the case. I also thought maybe I ran the experiment in a browser instead of fullscreen, but I can't reproduce the issue by doing that deliberately. It's happened across multiple experiments with different set-ups which were not all copied from each other (i.e. it might be a general problem).

Just wondering if someone else has had the same issue and what the cause was. Maybe a Windows notification forced active windows to minimise? (I've now turned all notifications off). System specs and experiment attached.

Thanks

experiment.zip

and best,

Kate

sebastiaan

Hi Kate @stoney ,

It sounds like Windows decided to change the application focus, which the operating system can do for different reasons, perhaps indeed including a notification. Another thing that comes to mind, because I've heard that before (though never seen it for myself), is that the experiment window loses focus if it's been inactive for a long time, for example because it is waiting for several minutes for a participant to press a button. Could that be it?

— Sebastiaan