Include stimuli unique to individual participants

Builder
1

OS (e.g. Win10): Big Sur
PsychoPy version (e.g. 1.84.x): 2021.2.2

What are you trying to achieve?:
Dear all,
I have set up an experiment in which I play a bunch of sounds to participants (10 sounds per trial x 5 blocks) and they make a binary choice concerning what they heard. This works just fine, I’ve got nested loops around my trial routine (outer loop with a conditions file that includes the keys for condition files for the inner loop).

My problem is that I would also like to include two additional sounds in each trial that are unique to each participant (should be able to use participantID from expinfo, right?) but I don’t know how to do this.

I am new to psychopy and would greatly appreciate some input!

Please let me know if I need to provide more info.
Many thanks!

2

If it’s one sound per participant, you could use a Code :code: component to define a dict with all the sound files in like so:

soundsDict = {
1: "path/to/sound1.wav",
2: "path/to/sound2.wav",
etc.
}

and then set the Sound :sound: component to Update Every Repeat and be soundsDict[expInfo['participantID']]

The only condition would be that the participant ID in the experiment info dialog would have to be one of the keys from soundsDict

3

@TParsons
Thank you so much for your reply!
It is two additional and unique sounds per participant, per block - but I suppose I could use a list in the dictionary?
There are 5 blocks, let’s call them A B C D and E. In each block, 10 sounds (1A, 2A, 3A…10A) + another 2 sounds unique to each participant that I would like to include. I think your suggestion would work if I included the paths to (1A, 2A, 3A…10A) and the unique sounds in each list?

Would one have to create a dictionary for each block? The conditions file in the outermost loop only includes the names of the conditions file for the inner loop (trials within block).

Would I add the code component in the Begin Experiment tab?
Thank you again :slight_smile:

4

I think you could also add a code component at the beginning of one of your first routines in which you create the sound names relative to each participant like

my_sound_A =  _thisDir + os.sep + 'subject' + expInfo['participant'] + '_A' + .wav
my_sound_B =  _thisDir + os.sep + 'subject' + expInfo['participant'] + '_B' + .wav

This means you do have to have wav files named subject1_A.wav, subject1_B.wav, subject2_A.wav, and so on.

Then for each block you can read your spreadsheet, add your customized sounds, and rewrite it

my_file = open(my_spreadsheet_blockA)
my_stim_list = my_file.readlines()

filename_to_write = _thisDir + os.sep + 'blockA_customized.csv'
with open(filename_to_write,'w') as out:
    out.write(''.join(my_stim_list+[my_sound_A]+[my_sound_B]))

And in the loop of each block you enter block?_customized.csv as your condition file.
Might not be the most elegant way but I would try something like that.