Word monitoring: how to include response time and let the experiment run?

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Hello everyone,

I am using PsychoPy v2021.2.3 on MacOS Montery. I have a question that is probably basic but that has driven me insane in the past few days.

I am trying to build a word monitoring task. Participants should see a sentence word by word (like a self-paced reading task, but words are changing without actions from the participants). They should press ‘space’ when one word that they are monitoring is appearing. I need the reaction time for that word only to be recorded, but I don’t want this response to end the experiment. I’ve tried a few different actions and manipulated the settings in the response box but I haven’t been successful so far. How long should the response be? Should I assign a correct answer to one given word in my stimuli file? Do you have any solution or a tip in the right direction?

Apologies if I’m not explaining this well enough, I am still learning PsychoPy.

Looking forward to reading from you,
S.P.

2

Hi There!

Hopefully this demo might help as I used it for something similar. The sentences for each trial are set using this spreadsheet:
conditions.xlsx (17.9 KB)

And this is the PsychoPy file
word_by_word.psyexp (11.0 KB)

In the psychopy file there are 2 routines. The first uses a snippet of python code to seperate the sentence into a list of words. The inner loop then works through this list of words one by one. Because there is a keyboard component in th “show_words” routine, the participant can respond to any of the words (and the response time will be relative to the onset of that word). But because the keyboard component does not have “force end routine” checked the participants response does not have any influence over the stimulus presentation directly.

Hope this helps,
Becca