Participants forced to abort vast majority of experiments, incomplete data

[Ry_Batten]

OS Windows 11
PsychoPy version: PsychoPy v2026.1.1 (running in 2025.1.1; trying to change to “latest” in settings causes an error, saying that “latest” is undefined).
Standard Standalone Installation? (y)
Do you want it to also run online? (y)
What are you trying to achieve?: Currently, very few of my online experiments are properly being completed, instead resulting in high numbers of “aborted” experiments, despite reports and time logs consistent with participants finishing the experiment. This has resulted in partial, or no, data from most participants (n=32). It’s hard to address, because everything appears to run fine locally.

One potential wrinkle is that I’m recruiting through Prolific, and directing participants to the experiment using a link (https://run.pavlovia.org/ … etc.).

If it provides any insight, the csv files it does produce are anywhere from empty, to partially complete (e.g., some columns populated with variable names), and some that are complete, but only for a few trials. This is all for participants who reported completing the experiment, and whose tracked time (through Prolific) is consistent with expectations and other participants.

What did you try to make it work?:

From what I can tell, participants are making it through the entire experiment, but the experiment isn’t terminating, resulting in ‘aborted’ status in 30/32 (96%) of completed experiments.

• Originally, the experiment ended with a screen that asked them to press ‘space’ in the final routine, with that key press set to force the end of routine (I’m using Builder, here). This worked locally, but at least one participant reported hitting the key and nothing happening. The rest did not report error messages or anything.

• To try to get around this, I added another routine after the “press to end” routine, which only contained a text element saying “thank you,” set to run for 2 seconds. This did not fix anything, but led to a different error (online not locally). One participant reported: I have just completed day 1 of this study, but ran into the following error on the final “PRESS SPACEBAR TO END” screen…

  The error said:
  “ReferenceError.Can’t find variable: Thank_youClock”

• From this, it appears that the ‘space’ key is working to advance to the next routine, but that routine is now crashing. Ideally, I could remove this routine, and have the key press end the experiment.

Link to the most relevant existing thread you have found: Pavlovia Experiements "Aborted"

What specifically went wrong when you tried that?: I’m unable to find any proposed solutions to my problem previously posted in the forum.

[wakecarter]

@Ry_Batten

Thank_youClock

Have you searched your code for Thank_youClock ?

Wakefield's Daily Tips

Find in experiment I don’t use the PsychoPy Builder menu items much but this one is particularly useful, especially for tracking down the sources of name conflicts. This feature is currently in the Experiment menu but is moving to the Edit menu in 2025.1.0. The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+F. [image] [image] If you double-click on one of the lines it will open that component. Note that multiple references in the same code component are not listed separately.

Change use version to blank instead of latest.

[Ry_Batten]

Thanks for your suggestions. I was not able to find Thank_youClock in the list. I’ve attached images of what it found (I believe it’s just the routine?)

[wakecarter]

The issue is that you have ended a name with an underscore.

Wakefield's Daily Tips

Naming conventions In PsychoPy, the names of components, routines, loops and variables must all be unique. For example, you can’t have a text component called text_1 and also use text_1 as the name of the variable that contains the text itself. One way to reduce the chances of accidentally reusing names is to have a naming convention. For example: lower_case_with_underscores for components, routines and loops TitleCase for spreadsheet variables reverseSentenceCase for code variables Use var…

[JensBoelte]

Hello @Ry_Batten

@Ry_Batten

• Originally, the experiment ended with a screen that asked them to press ‘space’ in the final routine, with that key press set to force the end of routine (I’m using Builder, here). This worked locally, but at least one participant reported hitting the key and nothing happening. The rest did not report error messages or anything.
• To try to get around this, I added another routine after the “press to end” routine, which only contained a text element saying “thank you,” set to run for 2 seconds. This did not fix anything, but led to a different error (online not locally). One participant reported: I have just completed day 1 of this study, but ran into the following error on the final “PRESS SPACEBAR TO END” screen…

AFAIK, what is important for an experiment to end properly is that the participants wait unit the final message appears (see below, I change the text of this box to “Vielen Dank für Ihre Mitarbeit”). The browser needs some time to upload the data to the server.

Best wishes Jens