Confused how to create excel spreadsheet for conditions

OS: MacOS Catalina
PsychoPy version: 2020.1.2
Standard Standalone? (y/n): Y

What are you trying to achieve?:
I haven’t used psychopy before so I’m trying to figure out how to use excel spreadsheets for my conditions.

I am creating an auditory oddball task where participants are presented with two tones (high pitch and low pitch) which are representative of birds singing. I am using two .wav audio files - one for each tone and they are simply one beep each. Participants need to estimate the proportion of green birds (high pitch tone) to orange birds (low pitch tone) continuously throughout the trial

  • The proportions are 70/30 or 90/10

There are 32 blocks in the whole experiment.
Within each block there are 80 tones that need to be randomised. The block will either be cued or uncued (using videos) as well as being either stable or volatile.

  • Stable conditions are where the proportion of birds doesn’t change through the block (e.g. 70% green to 30% orange for the entire block).
  • Volatile conditions are where the higher proportion bird switches halfway through the block (participants are not aware of this and need to pick up on it themselves - e.g. starts at 90% orange/10% green and switches to 30% orange/70% green).

I need the sounds within the blocks to be randomised and I also, ideally, need the block order to be randomised for each condition.

Can anyone assist me in how I would use excel to create these conditions? Would I create different routines for each block? Hopefully this makes sense.

Many thanks in advance,
Lauren

No, you really should just need one routine to run the trials, and a second one to do something crafty. The cleverness here should come from nesting several loops around those trial routines, to control the blocks.

I would say that you would need to nest your routines within three levels of loops:

  • the outer-most loop encompasses everything . It will be connected to an “über” conditions file, which actually controls what block-level conditions files will be used. i.e. this conditions file will have 32 rows. Let’s call this loop blocks.
  • the middle-level loop encompasses both routines. It won’t be connected to a conditions file. It will just be set to have an nReps value of 2. This will allow us to control what happens mid-way through “volatile” blocks. Let’s call this loop splits.
  • the inner-most loop will actually run the trials. It will only encompass the trial routine. i.e. the other routine comes before the trial routine but is not nested within this inner-most loop. We won’t directly connect this loop to a conditions file: instead we will use a variable name that comes from the “über” conditions file. Let’s call this loop trials.

The “über” conditions file should look something like this (with 32 rows of data + the header row):

cued  stable  proportion_1  proportion_2  trial_file_1     trial_file_2
yes   yes     0.7           0.7           yy_7_80_A.xlsx
yes   yes     0.9           0.9           yy_9_80_A.xlsx
yes   no      0.7           0.9           yy_7_40_A.xlsx  yy_9_40_A2.xlsx
yes   no      0.9           0.7           yy_9_40_A.xlsx  yy_7_40_A2.xlsx
no    yes     0.7           0.7           ny_7_80_A.xlsx
no    yes     0.9           0.9           ny_9_80_A.xlsx
no    no      0.7           0.9           ny_7_40_A.xlsx  ny_9_40_A2.xlsx
no    no      0.9           0.7           ny_9_40_A.xlsx  ny_7_40_A2.xlsx
yes   yes     0.7           0.7           yy_7_80_B.xlsx
yes   yes     0.9           0.9           yy_9_80_B.xlsx
yes   no      0.7           0.9           yy_7_40_B.xlsx  yy_9_40_B2.xlsx
yes   no      0.9           0.7           yy_9_40_B.xlsx  yy_7_40_B2.xlsx
no    yes     0.7           0.7           ny_7_80_B.xlsx
no    yes     0.9           0.9           ny_9_80_B.xlsx
no    no      0.7           0.9           ny_7_40_B.xlsx  ny_9_40_B2.xlsx
no    no      0.9           0.7           ny_9_40_B.xlsx  ny_7_40_B2.xlsx
# etc

You can come up with your own naming convention for the conditions files, but above they just encode the conditions used. The idea is that for “stable” blocks, you will only need a single conditions file (the ones labelled “80” above), which will have 80 rows. For “volatile” blocks, you’ll need to provide two files, each of 40 rows (labelled “40” above). The “A”, “B”, etc reflect multiple versions of your files, which might or might not be required depending on your design (i.e. it might be possible to just have 8 rows in this file but set the Reps value to 4 to get your 32 blocks). I’m not entirely clear about the information that needs to be in these files (it depends on the .wav files you are using), so it is quite possible that you could actually have quite a small number of these files, rather than lots of individually-named ones as the table above currently implies.

Here comes the magic. In the non-trial routine (the one that is inside the splits loop but not inside the trials loop), insert a code component (from the “custom” components panel). In its “begin routine” tab, we will put some code to decide what conditions file will run on this block:

if stable == 'yes':
    condition_file = trial_file_1 # 80 trials
    splits.finished = True # only one iteration needed
else: # volatile, so change files as needed
    if splits.thisN == 0:
         condition_file = trial_file_1 # 1st 40 trials
    else: # 2nd iteration, so switch file:
         condition_file = trial_file_2 # 2nd 40 trials

Put $condition_file in the conditions field of the trials loop.

The first routine doesn’t need any stimulus components: it’s only function is to run the custom code above.

You should set the trials and blocks loops to be random order as needed.

Hey Michael,

Thanks so much for your response, it’s really helpful! I’m yet to attempt this as I’ve been working on different aspects of my task but I’m sure I will be able to work it out with your description!

I completely forget that I have 16 counterbalanced orders for my blocks and that they themsleves are not actually random! How would this change things? Do I still need the three loops?

I was also wondering how I would go about having a pseudorandomised order of the tones in each block. Every 10 tones needs to be of the set proportion (90/10 or 70/30) and within that the tones are presented in a random order. BUT there needs to be a constraint where deviant sounds (the ones of a lesser proportion) cannot follow each other.

Let me know what materials I can provide you with (if any) that would help make more sense of my task. I don’t want to bombard with lots of screenshots that may not be relevant!