Creating a drop-down menu with options for subjects' responses?

[Yuliya Yoncheva]

Greetings E-prime experts,

I am programming an experiment in E-prime 2.0 Professional, in which the optimal way to collect participants' responses would be to have them select 1 out of 10 options from a drop-down menu.

(e.g., a subject needs to choose between "$10 in a week" or "$1 or $2 or $3 ... immediately." It is argued that offering selection from a drop-down menu promotes more careful consideration of each option.) 

The closest example I found in the E-prime Samples database on pstnet.com was the Visual Analog scale, which would enable on-screen presentation of all options simultaneously (e.g., as 10 individual boxes), and allow the subject to click on the box of their choice. However, my participants have clinical attention deficits, therefore presenting all options at once would be too distracting and is thus not a viable idea.

Is there a way to create a drop-down box? If not, what work-around solutions come to mind? 

One hypothetical idea I have is to create an in-line script pausing E-prime and allowing a switch to MS Excel (where I can create a drop down menu in a file) before returning to E-prime. The duration of such subject-paced pause would be a proxy (albeit very rough) for response latency.

I don't know whether it is even feasible. Does anyone have experience with such an approach? Alternatively, could anyone recommend a response collection software that would be better suited for building drop-down menus?

 

Any feedback or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you kindly,

Yuliya Yoncheva

PS: So far the experiments I have programmed have focused on millisecond temporal precision on the presentation side (which I know is E-prime's strength), and not flexibility on the response collection interface (which I gather is not an emphasis in this particular software).

[Paul Groot]

Yuliya,

Linking another application (like excel) wouldn't be a very reliable method, I'm afraid (not even sure if that would be possible).

You could implement such an interface in eprime by using a series of bitmap images that mimic a fancy GUI on subject responses. When a lot of different images are required (because of dynamic content for example) you could also use inline script to generate the screen contents. However, EPrime only offers basic drawing support, so that might suboptimal. I sometimes combine elementary graphics (drawn by inline script) with a fancy bitmap as background image. If you would like to implement mouse-clicks (instead of keyboard presses), you definitively have to deal with inline scripting. (You could have a look at the following example script: http://pfcgroot.nl/e-prime/84-full-scripts/74-tower-of-hanoi.html)

On the other hand: if timing is not extremely critical, you could also use a more GUI-oriented programming environment (such as Visual Basic, or something similar).

Best

Paul

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[Yuliya Yoncheva]

Hi Paul,

Thank you very much for your fast reply and for sharing your in-line scripts implementing The Tower of Hanoi task. This is a very valuable example.   

Temporal precision is not crucial so mimicking a GUI would sounds like the most reasonable approach using E-prime.

Thank you again. 

Best wishes, Yuliya