Incorrect and inconsistently incorrect time stamps from PsychoPy?

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OS (e.g. Win10): Win10
PsychoPy version (e.g. 1.84.x): 2.4
Standard Standalone? (y/n) If not then what?: y

I have experienced some very bizarre behaviour from PsychoPy lately and really hope someone can help. We’re running a speech production experiment with audio recording (participant sees words on a screen that they have to read after some amount of preparation time marked by beeps). There are some beeps in the experiment which we use to align the audio recording and PsychoPy timestamps. For some participants, everything has worked exactly precisely, but for a number of participants, with the exact same experimental lists and experiment files, the time stamps from PsychoPy seem to be wrong (28 seconds behind between the start of the test phases), and the timings seem to drift (decreasing to 23 seconds off later in the experiment).

There are no obvious warnings or errors from PsychoPy that I can see, and nothing should have changed between these participants. Does anyone know what might be wrong? I’ve attached a zip file with the experiment files and the anonymised data from two participants with the very same stimuli list – including their logs. The timings and everything for S107 are perfect, but for S105 they’re off and drift inconsistently in the course of the experiment (meaning we really can’t use these results). :frowning: I’d be really appreciative of any pointers or anything I should look for!

Best wishes,

Jade

exp_3_prepared_enclitic.zip (647 KB)

I think the issue may be hardware and not PsychoPy (for example, a drained or bad CMOS battery leading to poor time keeping). If hardware issues like this occur, where information is being lost, does PsychoPy have any warnings/errors that would come up to notify us of this? I don’t see any indication in the log files of anything being wrong, and without the corresponding audio recording (which we know is right), I wouldn’t necessarily know that anything is wrong with the data. :-\