auditory secondary task

[Antonello]

Hi, I'm new in using E-prime. I want to create that:

While the participants read a narrative text, they are involved in
detecting pure tone (presented in a random time manner) in a secondary
task. How can I do that? I am interested in record either reaction
times about the secondary task either in record reading duration time.

Thanks in advance

Antonello

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[Michiel Spape]

Hi Antonello,
How new are you to E-Prime? If the answer is "very new", I will predict you'll have quite some difficulty getting this to work - indeed, how you seem to suggest you would like to do this suggests this may well be the case. That is, E-Prime slightly forces you to do things in a time-locked (to use an ERP term) manner: read single word, detect response to task1, detect respond to task 2, is quite easy, but 'go on reading while detecting single responses continuously'... not so much. That said, if you'd have a single slide with, say, a page of text and a sound stimulus on it, you can collect multiple responses (in advanced properties of responses/timing tab). Then, you'd have to code stuff so that the response times of these responses are all recorded.
It occurs to me, however, you might be able to do it in a less complex way (even if it will look a bit ugly):
Make a list for your trials (say TrialList). Code at least ALL text you want your subject to read (might well be a page? Use \n for new lines) as an attribute (say myStory) such that each trial has something else to read. Let the procedure within that TrialList refer to another list (say SubTrialList) with at least one attribute, say mySoundfile. Record both empty and non-empty soundfiles (for timing purposes), say "empty.wav" and "beep.wav" and fill your SubTrialList with these two. Now, if you want a single trial to have, say, 20 beeps and 80 silences, each of 1 second long (or 10 ms beep and 990 ms silence), just have [mySoundfile] refer to 20 beeps and 80 silences. For each SubTrialList level, use the same procedure, with, in it, at least one (or two, if you want to record whether subjects press a button BEFORE the onset of the stimulus) slide. The slide then has text [myStory] and sound [mySoundfile]. As said, it's probably best to have another, but similar slide before this slide, such that you can collect responses that precede the sound (anticipatory responses). This has, as a benefit, that you can thereby randomise the duration of the intervals between beeps.

Oh, and try to be a bit more specific in your question: where did you get stuck? Unless you prefer someone actually to make your experiment - might be a bit more expensive though.
Best,
Mich


Michiel Spapé
Research Fellow
Perception & Action group
University of Nottingham
School of Psychology

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[Antonello]

Yes, I'm very new! Thanks for all your suggestions! My difficult was
to beep in a random mode while the text was present!
I will try to follow your suggestions!
Best regards
Antonello Puglia

(PhD student in Cognitive Psychology, University of Chieti-Pescara,
Italy)

On 20 Apr, 14:12, Michiel Spape <Michiel.Sp...@nottingham.ac.uk>
wrote:

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[David McFarlane]

Antonello,

Sounds like you want to run some kind of a "dual
task" experiment. We had a thread about this
toward the end of last year, please take a look
at
http://groups.google.com/group/e-prime/browse_thread/thread/360a5c54d63ae241
. You might also try a search using "dual task",
and the Dual Task example downloadable from the PST web site.

-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder

[David McFarlane]

I just took a look at PST's DualTask example
myself. It essentially runs a task within a task,
i.e., secondary List/Proc stimuli within a
primary (and static) List/Proc stimulus, with
stimuli overlaid by means of TextDisplay Frame attributes.


(Also note that their code contains yet another
example of poor programming practice. The CheckTime inline uses the line

If Clock.Read >= LngEndTime OR LngEndTime-Clock.Read <= 500 Then

First, it is poor practice to use Clock.Read more
than once in a logical test, since technically it
will have a different value for each test; best
to store Clock.Read to an intermediate variable
and then test with that variable. Then of course
(LngEndTime-Clock.Read <= 500) is logically
equivalent to (Clock.Read >= LngEndTime-500), and
whenever (Clock.Read >= LngEndTime-500) then it
is also true that (Clock.Read >=
LngEndTime). Thus the two tests are superfluous,
and that line should be reduced to simply

If Clock.Read >= LngEndTime - 500 Then

which solves both issues. In general, keep a
wary eye out when looking at PST examples, they
are rife with poor programming practices and mistakes.)