Consuming credits in Pavlovia online experiments

Online experiments
1

URL of experiment: -

Description of the problem:

Hi guys.
I have conducted an online experiment using Pavlovia.
I have a question about credits.
Why are credits consumed even though the participants do not finish the experiment?
I got five results, but 10 credits were consumed not reserved.

Does anyone know about this issue?

2

Credit consumption is related to data output, rather than experiment completion.

If you enable partial data collection, credits will be consumed regardless of experiment completion.

There is a setting on the dashboard on Pavlovia to disable partial data collection, uncheck that to make sure data is generated only if the experiment is completed.

1 Like
3

Thanks for your information.
Then, when does data collect and when are credits consumed?
For example, There are 5 completed results and 34 aborted results in my online experiment but still only 10 credits are consumed.

4

I am not sure why that would happen. If you had partial data collection enabled, you would have 34 credits consumed.

1 Like
5

Hello @Dasom_Kwon,

In the interest of fairness, we do not consume a credit if the experiment result contains almost no data. That covers situations when a participant starts the experiment and immediately leaves. It would seem unfair to then consume a credit.
Best wishes,

Alain

3 Likes
6

Thank you guys.
I solved this problem through your information.

7

Hi,
I was wondering if there was a way for the creators to manual assign credits to a project? It worked fine for my last project but it is unfortunately not letting me assign my purchased credits to the new experiment.
Thank you

8

Could you share the path of your experiment with me so I can look into the matter for you?

9

Of course. Thank you so much.
The project is under Baghami 3 October Version
created under user : lwhitfield
I am the 2nd developer : poojamkher , pkher@scu.edu , if that helps
I wanted half of my credits assigned to this project if possible
created: 2020-10-06
updated: 2020-10-07
GitLab Id: #67582

10

I dont know if this link would help but I will paste it.
https://pavlovia.org/lwhitfield/baghami-3-october-version

11

Hello @Pooja_Kher,

At the moment it is not possible for someone to assign credits to an experiment that they did not create. That will change in the near future but has not been implemented just yet.
But since the two of you share the same institutional email domain, I would suggest that you share some of your credits with lwhitfield. There is a [Share credits] button on the Credits tab of your dashboard for just that purpose.
Let me know if that helps!

Alain

12

Hello!
I am sorry to reply to such an old subject, but I have a similar situation with the credit consumption. I have tested it in multiple ways in the running mode and I got these results:

I have an experiment that includes 4 tasks presented in randomized order. I have checked the Save incomplete results option, the results were saved in database mode (but the same happeden when data was saved in .csv mode) and the experiment was in running mode (the only way to require credits). I allocated 10 credits to the experiment and ran it in several ways to see how the credits were consumed.

  1. I ran it first until I got to the first task and then left the experiment (esc + close browser tab) → no credit consumed, but the platform registered an incomplete result and included some partial results in the database.
  2. The second time, I ran the task until i got to the middle and then left the experiment (esc + close browser tab) → no credit consumed, but the platform registered an incomplete result and included partial results in the database.
  3. The third time, I ran it until I got to the finish, but closed the browser tab before the green message appeared (it takes a few moments from when I click the last slide of the experiment until the green message appears). → no credit consumed, but the platform registered one complete participant and complete results in the database (I had the last click in the experiment registered).
  4. The fourth time I ran the entire task and waited until the green message appeared on the screen → only now did the platform consume one credit and registered a complete result.

My conclusion here was that the platform only consumes credits when the participant waits for the platform to show the green message (which I understand indicates that the data has been communicated to the server). I only found this out after we ran the experiment with some participants and the final number of complete data we had in the database were not the same as the number of participants registered as completed in the platform. If it was true that the platform does not consume credits in the task is at the beginning, then it should have consumed credits in my second and third situations as well, which it did not.

A second question I have is what does the number of credits in the first page of the Dashboard represent. We have purchased about 200 credits, only consumed about 50 (registered in different experiments) and the number there is 130. It is not clear if that number represents the total number of available credits and, if so, why is it different than what we obtained if we calculated the consumed credits in each experiment and substracted that from the total of 200 we purchased.

I am not sure if this is a bug, but we are planning a new wave of data collection using this experiment and I wanted to clarify how the credit system works.

Thank you!