Dear Wakecarter,
thank you for your kind and swift reply.
Yes, that is a good idea.
However, I was hoping to avoid it since the stimuli of interest in my study are ONLY auditory. Using text as a proxy for a 3 second delay would introduce a new problem - for accuracy, I would probably need to synchronise this text component with the screen refresh (frames) whilst my critical auditory components do not have to be synchronised with the screen, thus probably causing potential discrepancy.
I thought that some elegant conditional statement could be the purest solution. What do you think?
Perhaps you could have a look at my newest question whether it is a big problem to synchronise audio stimuli and parallel port triggers with the screen (even though the audio and triggers are NOT related to the screen and thus the synchronisation imposes an unnecessary limitation of 60Hz refresh rate)?
Maybe it is not such a big deal as I think and I should use the text as you advised, and synchronise all with the screen refresh? The only trouble is I will be recording MEG and wanted to have most accurate timestamps and triggers possible.