E-Prime 3 not storing participants' response

[Ironclad Chomskyan]

We are running a pilot experiment where the participants are shown nonce words for a brief duration and then they have to type back the word. The experiment is designed to let the participants type in the word and hit enter before the next word is shown. I have data logging set to standard, but the data files are not storing the participants' responses. Some times, say around 4 to 5%, only the first letter of the word is stored, and other times the value stored is "NULL". I have included a few screenshots to show my settings, and an example of the data file. Does anyone have any clues what's going wrong? I am new to E-Prime, coming from Psychopy for the most part.

[McFarlane, David]

Unless you have done some extra configuration using the "Advanced..." button, your image shows that you have Instr3 set up to get one key press and then terminate. That is just normal behavior.

If you want to collect a string instead of a single character then you have to tell E-Prime to do that, i.e., set up multiple response collection. And you do that by clicking the "Advanced..." button and in the resulting dialog box configure Max Count, and in your case Termination Response as well. And if you want the subject to see what they type you should also set up an Echo Client.

For more information see the "Multiple Response Collection" example that you may download from the PST Support website. Also note that the strings that you collect may include notation for special keys, e.g., "Hello world" gets stored as "{Shift}Hello{SPACE}world". If you want to convert your strings back to normal then see the "Key Code Map" demo also available for download from PST.

-- David McFarlane

On 2024-03-15 Fri 4:06 AM, Ironclad Chomskyan wrote:
> We are running a pilot experiment where the participants are shown nonce words for a brief duration and then they have to type back the word. The experiment is designed to let the participants type in the word and hit enter before the next word is shown. I have data logging set to standard, but the data files are not storing the participants' responses. Some times, say around 4 to 5%, only the first letter of the word is stored, and other times the value stored is "NULL". I have included a few screenshots to show my settings, and an example of the data file. Does anyone have any clues what's going wrong? I am new to E-Prime, coming from Psychopy for the most part.

> 2.png
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> 1.png

[Ironclad Chomskyan]

Hi David!

Thanks a lot for your response! I really appreciate the feedback. 

So, I did have the "advanced" settings enabled to allow up to 20 characters followed by ENTER. ENTER being the "termination" condition. None of our stimuli has 20 characters, and we basically wanted the participants to type in their response followed by ENTER to proceed to the next stimuli. I have attached the screenshot below.

[McFarlane, David]

Well it looks to me that you have set up everything correctly, Echo Client and all (assuming that you set up Slide2 & Slide3 as you did for Instr3). I threw together a primitive demo for myself (nothing more than a List, a Procedure, and one TextDisplay to get a string response) and it worked perfectly.

If I had to troubleshoot this I would start by making a simple demo that did nothing but collect a string response from a stimulus, and then apply what I learn there to my main project. If I were still stumped then I would slowly build up my demo until I got it to break similar to my main project -- as I say, "Better to start from success than from failure."

-- David McFarlane

On 2024-03-20 Wed 12:31 PM, Ironclad Chomskyan wrote:
> Hi David!
>
> Thanks a lot for your response! I really appreciate the feedback.
>
> So, I did have the "advanced" settings enabled to allow up to 20 characters followed by ENTER. ENTER being the "termination" condition. None of our stimuli has 20 characters, and we basically wanted the participants to type in their response followed by ENTER to proceed to the next stimuli. I have attached the screenshot below.
>
>