How to make the duration of a routine fixed?

Builder
1

Hi,

My experiment has a part for participants to solve math problems. There is a loop to display each problem and each of them is self-paced. As participants may vary on the time they spend on these problems, I want to make the duration of this routine fixed (e.g., 5minutes). Can someone help me with this? Many thanks!

Best
Xiaotong

2

To make it more clear, here’s the screen shot and the code in this routine.

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111815×460 18.5 KB

begine experiment

inputText = ""

begin routine

shift_flag = False

each frame

n= len(theseKeys)
i = 0
while i < n:

    if theseKeys[i] == 'return' and len(inputText) > 0:
        continueRoutine = False
        break

    elif theseKeys[i] == 'backspace':
        inputText = inputText[:-1]  
        i = i + 1

    elif theseKeys[i] == 'space':
        inputText += ' '
        i = i + 1

    elif theseKeys[i] in ['lshift', 'rshift']:
        shift_flag = True
        i = i + 1
    elif theseKeys[i] == 'period':
        inputText = inputText + "."
        i = i + 1

    else:
        if len(theseKeys[i]) == 1:
            if shift_flag:
                inputText += chr( ord(theseKeys[i]) - ord(' '))
                shift_flag = False
            else:
                inputText += theseKeys[i]

        i = i + 1

end routine

thisExp.addData('inputText', inputText)
inputText=""

I want the duration of this routine to be a fixed 5 minutes. Actually I don’t know whether it’s correct to call it ‘routine’. I mean I want to controll the time of runing these trials as 5 minutes, no matter whether all the trials are finished or not. (note, participantes are self-paced on each trial. They’ll decide how much time they spend on each question.)

Could someone help me with this? Thank you.

4