Randomly selecting and grouping rows from a conditions file

Builder
1

Apologies if this issue has been posted before. I have a conditions file called cond.xlsx with a single column and 6 rows, each containing a different item of fruit.

Capture

I would like to write a code component at the beginning of my experiment which randomly sorts the rows into three conditions, each containing 2 rows. Ideally this would create a ‘temporary’ dict object (apologies if I’m using incorrect terminology) that would allow me to call rows from each condition in subsequent loops in the experiment.

Here is my code:

conditions = data.importConditions(u’cond.xlsx’)
shuffle(conditions)
cond_A = conditions[0:2]
cond_B = conditions[3:4]
cond_C = conditions[5:6]

I would then call specific conditions in subsequent loops:

Capture2

Ultimately I would like a way to record which items of fruit were assigned to each condition at the end of the experiment. However, when I try to run the experiment as-is, I get the following error

Capture3
################

If anyone can suggest a fix (and/or a way to save a record of which rows/items of fruit were assigned to each condition) I would be very grateful for the advice. Thanks in advance!

2

The selected rows field has to contain integers (ie the indices of the rows, not the content of the rows themselves).

You can achieve what you want without any code.

  • Put some fixed ranges in each of your loops (eg [0, 1] followed by [2, 3], etc).
  • Set each loop to be random but supply a common seed value so that the randomisation is constant across each loop.
  • I guess you want the randomisation to vary across subjects however, so enter a new seed value on each session into the information dialog at the start of the experiment, and refer to that variable from the expInfo dialog in each seed field.
3

Hi Michael

Thanks for the reply! I’m having trouble calling the expInfo as you suggested. I entered a new row in ‘Experiment settings’:

Capture

and then entered expInfo.setSeed in the seed field for each loop. This causes the following error:

AttributeError: 'dict' object has no attribute 'setSeed'

I also tried automating the process by instead creating a code component with
setSeed = random.randint(0,1000) # should select a random seed value between 0 and 1000

This runs fine (and seems to be selecting random rows, as intended), but after running the experiment a few times I realized it’s pulling the SAME selection of rows each time, so random.randint must be assigning the same value to setSeed each time…?

4

The dot notation gives you access to the methods of the dictionary class, things like .keys(), copy(), etc. You look up individual values in Python dictionaries like this:

expInfo['setSeed']

See Python - Dictionary

5

Ah! That makes sense. I tried using expInfo[‘setSeed’] and got the following error:

File “mtrand.pyx”, line 684, in mtrand.RandomState.seed (numpy\random\mtrand\mtrand.c:13996)
TypeError: Cannot cast array from dtype(‘<U2’) to dtype(‘int64’) according to the rule ‘safe’

My understanding is that the value from expInfo[‘setSeed’] should be converted to float, which I tried to do with a code component:

randValue = expInfo[‘setSeed’]
randSeed = map(float, randValue)

But no luck! Can you suggest a work around? Again, thanks in advance for the help :slight_smile:

6

Try:

eval(expInfo['setSeed'])
7

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the reply! The suggestion worked (in that no errors occurred), however I found that this pulled exactly the same rows for each condition on every run, regardless of what seed value I provided :frowning:

SO I figured out a workaround. I did away with the seed values, and created a shuffled list of values corresponding to rows in my conditions file:

import random
row_vals = [0,1,2,3,4,5]
shuffle(row_vals)

I then assigned a range of indices in the (now shuffled) list to keys in a dictionary:

a = row_vals[0:2]
b = row_vals[4:6]
dict = {'cond_A':a,'cond_B':b}

and called a random key for each loop (note that in the builder I set the rows field of my two loops to $loop1 and $loop2)

x = random.choice(dict.keys())
loop1 = []
loop2 = []

loop1 = dict.get(x) 

if loop1 == dict.get('cond_A'):
    loop2 = dict.get('cond_B')
elif loop1 == dict.get('cond_B'):
    loop2 = dict.get('cond_A')

note that this can be tweaked to include a third condition (in this case, cond_C) using nested if-else function:

if loop1 == dict.get('cond_A'):
    if random.random()>0.5:
        loop2 = dict.get('cond_B')
    else:
        loop2 = dict.get('cond_C')
elif loop1 == dict.get('cond_B'):
    if random.random()>0.5:
        loop2 = dict.get('cond_A')
    else:
        loop2 = dict.get('cond_C')
elif loop1 == dict.get('cond_C'):
    if random.random()>0.5:
        loop2 = dict.get('cond_A')
    else:
        loop2 = dict.get('cond_B')
1 Like