nReps randomizing and Data Collection

I’m trying to replicate this procedure as part of my graduate research, and I’m lost about how to go about it where I’d be able to measure latency (“reluctance”) to make the first response to the second stimulus within each trial and session. Below is what my builder looks like. The first loop is because I need x (nReps) amount of polygon clicks. I’d like to turn my nReps into a condition so there’s a range if that is possible.

OS : Mac OS 10.15.6
PsychoPy version : StandalonePsychoPy-2021.2.3-macOS
Standard Standalone? (y/n) y
What are you trying to achieve?:

FITD procedure. Each trial starts with a single effort stimulus appearing on a random side of the screen. The effort stimulus is either LOW, MED, or HIGH (1–9, 10–19, 20–29 pecks). After the pigeon pecks the first stimulus, there will be a 3-s delay period, and after that, the second effort stimulus appears. All pigeons are rewarded after having finished pecking the second stimulus, and after a 10-s ITI, a new trial starts.

Above you can see my builder. Stimulus one would be the first circle appearing and stimulus two would be the 2nd circle one in the loop. How would I be able to track the time between the first stimulus ending (i.e. clicked 5 times) and the first response to the 2nd stimulus?

Hi @Brett99,

Because you write “clicked”, not “pecked”, I assume you are studying people, not pidgeons. Unless you taught pidgeons to use a mouse, which would be awesome. :slight_smile:
Could you share more details on how your first two Routines are built? I assume you are using clickable button compnent to measure mouse clicks.
Do you need to track the time between the end of the first stimulus nd the first response to the 2nd stimulus? Is it not enough to measure response time relative to the onset of the 2nd stimulus? If I understood correctly there is a 3 second pause before the second stimulus is shown, so you can just add 3 to the second stimulus reaction time, right?

Hey friend,

The experiment is done on pigeons and people. I have trained pigeons to pack a touchscreen which does the same functionality as the mouse click (I believe). And yes, I need to track the time between the end of the first stimulus and the first response to the 2nd stimulus (when I look at the excel document after the trial it’s very messy so I don’t know if my data settings are wrong).

Here’s how the trial is set up currently:
Trial Start Message → Low Stimulus Circle Presented, this is looped 5 times and set on consecutive → Then the seconds Low Stimulus Circle is Presented, this is looped 5 times and set on consecutive → TrailEnd is a 2 second interval where the hopper to reinforce the pigeons goes up → blank is the 10s interval between trials. This is to be looped 4 times randomly (LowLowTr - I have not been able to figure out how to make this randomly appear during the experiment’s 36 trials).

The experiment session ultimately has 36 trials. In each session, there are four trials for each of the nine possible stimuli-pair combinations (Experiment 1: LOW–LOW, LOW–MED, LOW–HIGH, MED–LOW, MED–MED, MED–HIGH, HIGH–LOW, HIGH–MED, HIGH–HIGH).

Things I’m also trying to figure out:

I want to set the low circle nReps (loop Low, Low1, Low2, etc) to be 1-9 and a randomly selected amount of clicks during each experiment. Could this be done with excel conditions? I tried doing so and it returned an error saying the condition (Clicks) was not defined. Also, I want the circle to randomly be presented to the left or the right. I tried doing so and it returned an error saying the condition (target_x) was not defined. Also, the data issue above.

Thank you for your help!

If any of you guys can help, I would really appreciate it! @mmagnuski @dvbridges @Michael

I think it would be best if you shared a screenshot of your first two routines (not only the experiment flow).
Your clickable button object should save its rt parameter to the csv file. This rt is with respect to button onset. To get the time that passed since last click you’d have to add the 3 seconds that the subject has to wait for the second stimulus. Unless I misundrestood and you would like to record clicks also during this 3s period (although the procedure would not react to these clicks).