Setting up Response for Staircase Manually in Mouse-Tracking Experiment

Builder
1

Hi everyone,

I am using psychopy to design an experiment in which participants reach for targets using their mouse. Success is determined by whether the target circle contains the mouse during a specific time window. We have stored a boolean variable which indicates whether the participants succeeded or not. We tried to set that boolean value as the response for a staircase of target size in a code component, but it seems to have no effect and the trial is recorded as incorrect every time.


trials.addResponse(pos_corr)

Going through the code, I found a comment preceding a line:


# NB PsychoPy doesn't handle a 'correct answer' for mouse events so doesn't know how to handle mouse with StairHandler

trials.addData('mouse_6.x', mouse_6.x)

So I suspect that it has been returning false because of this. There is no keyboard component in the experiment.

Is there any way that I can set up the response for the staircase manually? Thanks in advance!

OS (e.g. Win10): Mac Big Sur
PsychoPy version (e.g. 1.84.x): 2020.2.8

2

To add a line in your data file use

thisExp.addData(‘column name’,value)

4

Hi wakecarter, thanks for the response! I don’t want to add a line to my data file though, I want to set up a variable as the response for my staircase update. Do you have any solutions for that?

5

Are you asking

a) How to record whether the target circle contains the mouse, e.g. in End Routine

if target_circle.contains(mouse):
     pos_corr = 1
else:
     pos_corr = 0

or

b) How to save the string of responses, e.g. using

trialScores.append(pos_corr)
6

Neither. The question is how to update the staircase with a response manually computed from mouse position and not a keyboard input.

7

Hi,

Did you ever find a solution to this problem? I want to use the returned value from a rating scale to make up/down (incorrect/correct) decisions to “feed” the staircase algorithm. Currently I’m trying to simulate the subject having pressed ‘left’ or ‘right’ on the basis of a code block - and not having much joy.

Any ideas?

Cheers, Jon