Mouse Response and Space bar key

Builder
1

Hi, I am new to PsychoPy. I am building two experiments from the builder view but I am stuck with the following.

Experiment 1: sentence-picture matching task
After each trial (25 sentences to be matched to a picture), I want the participant to see a break screen with this message “Take a break! Press SPACE BAR when you’re ready to continue.”
The message correctly appears, but pressing the space bar doesn’t do anything and it becomes impossible to exit in any way.
In this routine (which I called breakScreen) I have a text component with the above text and a keyboard component with the following settings:
name: keySPACE
start $time 0.0
stop $duration blank
force end of routine checked
register keypress on press
allowed keys $ ‘space’ constant

Experiment 2: grammaticality judgement task
Participants should see on the screen of the trial a sentence written down (text component), and two buttons (yes and no). Everything displays correctly but the mouse cursor is not visible and it is impossible to click on either button. These are the mouse component settings I have:
name: mouseResponse
start $time
stop $duration blank
end routing on press valid click
new clicks only unchecked
clickable stimuli $yesButton, noButton
save mouse state on click
time relative to mouse onset
store params for clicked $name,
save onset/offset times checked
store correct checked
correct answer $correct_answer

I hope I’ve explained well but I can provide more details. Can you help me understand what the issues are. Thank you to anyone who can help me!

I’m using windows 11
PsychoPy version 2024.2.4

2

Hello @Ludovica

Do mind to post the revelvant routines with its components or post the experiment here? From what you post it looks ok.

Best wishes Jens

3

There is a bug in a recent version of PsychoPy with keyboard responses with a single allowed key with a long name. Try setting the allowed keys to “space”, “right”

The mouse can be set to visible via Experiment Settings / Screen

I don’t think you should have a $ in clickable stimuli.

4

I have seen this occasionally on differing hardware and software versions. Without the time to find the ‘root cause’, I just add a time-waster inside the loop such as
dummy=1 or core.wait(0.001)
which seems to help. Yes, this is distasteful kludge.

5

I would be very interested to see an example where this helps.