Calculating Button Presses Per Second . . .

[Reed Maxwell]

Hi, all: I'm attempting to calculate a measure of button presses per second . . . I'm curious if my logic is correct . . .

1. Button presses in response to a prompt are keyed as "1's" and "0's." So, in my E-Prime output I've got a variable Stim.RESP w/ "10101011010010"

2. I calculate a new variable ("Length") in Excel capturing the count of presses, namely by way of the Excel LENGTH function. So, in this case, Length is "14." 

3. I've got a reaction time variable, Stim.RT, that shows length of 3395 (3.395 seconds)

. . . This is where I'm worried I may be confused . . . Is Stim.RT the duration of the entire response? 

If it is, I presume I'd take my Length variable (i.e., 14) and divide it by my Stim.RT variable (i.e., 3395) and multiply the result by 1000 to find my presses per second. Is this correct? Thank you! 

[David McFarlane]

Note that

Stim.RT = Stim.RTTime - Stim.OnsetTime

(don't take my word for that, please check the numbers for yourself);
i.e., RT measures the time from the onset of the stimulus presentation
until the response, which I suppose means "the duration of the entire
response".

After that, your average calculation seems sound enough to me.

If you had any use for even finer detail, you could log data for each
individual response as shown in the "Multiple Response Collection"
example that you may download from the PST website.

---------------
David McFarlane
E-Prime training online:
http://psychology.msu.edu/Workshops_Courses/eprime.aspx
Twitter: @EPrimeMaster (https://twitter.com/EPrimeMaster)