How do you make a polygon appear in response to a spacebar? (please help!)

Builder
1

OS (e.g. Win10): Win 10
PsychoPy version (e.g. 1.84.x): v2022.2.5

What are you trying to achieve?:

I want a polygon component to appear in response to the participant’s space bar.

In my loop, I have four following components

  1. Code component
  2. Polygon component (named polygon3)
  3. Key response component (space)
  4. Image component (duration: 5 seconds)

What did you try to make it work?:
I’ve played with the opacity of the polygon which worked well locally but does not work online.
For this, the code component had was

if event.getKeys(‘space’):
polygon3.opacity = 1 # Make the Polygon visible

under Begin Routine and Each Frame. This worked well locally but did not work online.

I’ve also tried a different code where I can actually make the polygon appear. For this, I had:

polygon3.setAutoDraw(False) in the Begin Routine

if key_resp.keys == ‘space’:
polygon.setAutoDraw(True) # Show the polygon when spacebar is pressed

under Each Frame tab. But did not work.

What specifically went wrong when you tried that?:
Include pasted full error message if possible. “That didn’t work” is not enough information.

2

If polygon3.setOpacity(1) doesn’t work you could change the position (start the polygon off screen and then polygon3.setPos([0,0]) to move it to the centre.

I only use setAutoDraw if the component itself has been created in code or in an earlier routine (e.g. for the instructions)

I also tend to use a flag to avoid repeating the code every Frame, e.g. Begin Routine spacePressed = False, Each Frame if key_resp.keys == ‘space’ and spacePressed == False: spacePressed = True

1 Like
3

Okay, so per your suggestion, I set it so that the position of the polygon starts off-screen. When participants press the spacebar the polygon now moves to the center. This works great. Unfortunately, it only works locally but not online.

For this, I set the ‘code component’ as follows (the name of my polygon is polygon)

Begin Experiment:
start_pos = [-1.5, 0] # Off-screen left
center_pos = [0, 0] # Center of the screen

Begin Routine:
polygon.setPos(start_pos)

Each Frame:
if event.getKeys([‘space’]):
polygon.setPos(center_pos).

Again, this works locally but does not work with online experiments.
I can’t seem to figure out what the issues are here.

Would it be the polygon properties that might be the issue? Here are some screenshots of how I set it up.

image
image1535×1035 84.7 KB

Or maybe spacebar properties?

image
image1348×1156 109 KB

This is the URL of my experiment.
https://run.pavlovia.org/hkim174/rt04052024/?__pilotToken=c81e728d9d4c2f636f067f89cc14862c&__oauthToken=7b6930a6851d14fd7b3b8d7968838b07e641b6371105253a5e20e29260e9d050

Some help would be greatly appreciated.

4 
if spacebar.keys:
     polygon.setPos(center_pos)
1 Like
5

This worked! Thank you so much!

(For those encountering similar issues, make sure that you are using the “name” of the Keyboard component in your code, rather than using just a ‘space’)