Rapid Visual Image Trail slows down after including an Image Selecter

Builder
,
1

OS (Win10):
PsychoPy version (2022.2.5):

Hey guys,

In my experiment I have 4 trials. In each there is a stream of images, in which each picture is shown for 350ms. After every trial the participants are shown 5 random pictures out of each condition simultaniously and are asked to click on one target picture. Both routines, namely the series of images and the image selector are in a trial loop that randomly picks a condition. As soon as I include the imageSelecter Routine, it slows down the series of images routine a lot.

For the image selecter routine I have one code component. I believe that because both routines are in the same loop that after every picture shown in the series of pictures routine its loading the 5 images form the imageSelecter every iteration and that this slows down the routine. However, as I do use the continueRoutine = False boolean I should expect the imageObjects to not even be loaded in as the code is at the top in the builder right? Does anyone have an idea on how to improve the timing of the images shown?

Thanks for your time!

The code looks like this:

#This is the BeginExperiment Tab
imagePlaceholder = 'NF-1094.jpg'
imageSelect1 = imagePlaceholder
imageSelect2 = imagePlaceholder
imageSelect3 = imagePlaceholder
imageSelect4 = imagePlaceholder
imageSelect5 = imagePlaceholder
imageSelecter = []

#This is the BeginRoutine Tab
if faces_cond == 'onlyNeutral.xlsx' and curr_item_neutral >= 108:
    imageSelecter.append(random.choice(image_list_neutral))
    imageSelecter.append(random.choice(image_list_neutral))
    imageSelecter.append(random.choice(image_list_neutral))
    imageSelecter.append(random.choice(image_list_neutral))
    imageSelecter.append(image_list_neutral[tiltPosNeutral])
    shuffle(imageSelecter)
    imageSelect1 = imageSelecter[0]
    imageSelect2 = imageSelecter[1]
    imageSelect3 = imageSelecter[2]
    imageSelect4 = imageSelecter[3]
    imageSelect5 = imageSelecter[4]
    correctImage = image_list_neutral[tiltPosNeutral]
else:
    continueRoutine = False