What happened to 'Duration' in the parallel port trigger plugin?

Comments

• sebastiaan

  April 2016 edited 12:28PM

  Hi Grusha,

  This is really a question for @Bob, the developer of this plugin. But looking at the code, it seems that the option is indeed gone. What this option did before (if I recall correctly) is send a 0 trigger after a certain period. You can still do this manually, by simply inserting another parallel_port item to send a 0 trigger. But it's usually not necessary, which, I imagine, is why Bob removed the option.

  Is that helpful?

  Cheers!
  Sebastiaan

  
  
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• grushaprasad

  April 2016 edited April 2016

  Hi Sebastiaan!

  Thank you for your response!

  The way I understood it, it did send a zero trigger. However, because of the way it worked, that feature could be sort of hacked to make sure that the trigger was being sent exactly at the moment the visual stimulus was being presented. The way it was suggested (and the way I've been doing it) it to present:

  Sketchpad item for 0 ms (with stimuli)

  Parallel port trigger item (duration = duration I want the stimulus)

  Sketchpad item (blank screen)

  Since the parallel_port item doesn't change the screen configuration, the participant sees the stimulus for as long as the duration of the parallel port tigger is, and then the blank screen would sort of re-configure the monitor.

  Is this doing what I think it is doing? Or is there a way to use something else that already exists to do what I want it to do?

  Also, from what I understood, this hack can't be used for auditory stimuli. But, with the duration field, I could specify that I wanted the trigger to be sent for 4 ms. And then after that, the audio file would be played. So I knew that there is a 4ms delay between the trigger being sent and the participant hearing it. Is there a good way of knowing this, now that the duration field is not there?

  Thank you!!

  Grusha.
• eduard

  April 2016 edited 12:28PM

  Hi Grusha,

  Bob answered in this discussion why the duration parameters is missing.

  Good luck.

  Eduard

  
• grushaprasad

  April 2016 edited April 2016

  Hi Eduard!

  Thank you for pointing me to that! I've asked Bob there about how long the trigger is sent for now and whether the trigger necessarily coincides with the stimulus onset!