Tutorial: Basics Of Style (8/21)

Location

…\DirectRT\samples\2 basics\morestim.csv

Description

The following text is taken from the interactive tutorial located in the help folder after installation.  You may prefer to print these pages rather than having them on-screen during the tutorial.

This next sample is actually the same as the last. However you'll see how to apply a few other aspects of the style file. Click on Show me the styles! You've seen most of this by now.

Take a look at the MinMax value of the different styles. See how only Style 1 has a value for this? This tells DirectRT that you want to set a minimum and maximum RT value for any trial to which this style has been applied. Typically you wouldn't set a MinMax value for instruction screens.

Now click on the Options button in the lower right. There are a couple of important variables you can change here.

First you can see the messages that appear for trials on which subjects respond too slow or too fast. Try changing these messages to something you'd like. You can also change the delay-that is, how long the message stays on the screen. You can also change the style that's applied to the message. Try setting each to one of the other style codes in your style file.

You can also set the trial interval here. This is the amount of time that passes between the last stimulus of the last trial and the first stimulus of the next trial. It's important that this be sufficiently long for DirectRT to load and prepare the next trial if you want your trial interval to be constant.

Finally, you'll see here that you can change the display size that your session runs in. These samples were prepared to be run in 640x480 mode, but try selecting 800x600 or 1024x768 just to see what happens when you rerun the input file. Just make sure to switch it back for the remaining samples.