For my experiment I need some of the responses that participants give to be made visible to the other participants in the room. Ideally, after participants have selected their response the following screen will show the responses of all the participants in the room (including their own).
Would this kind of thing be possible using MediaLab?
Thanks in advance for any help!
Could you please describe the task you are trying to do in a bit more detail? How many computers have MediaLab? How are the computers connected? Are they all trying to use the same single set of MediaLab file(s)?
It would also be helpful if you could either upload copies of your MediaLab files here or send them to me directly at [email]support@empirisoft.com[/email] so that I can take a look at them.
Thanks for your response! We don't currently have any software and are trying to work out which software would be best for what we are trying to do. So unfortunately we don't have any files to send to you at the moment - we are just trying to figure out what would be possible with this software to see whether or not it would suit our needs. I am new to using experiments, but I hope I manage to clarify things a bit more below.
Participants will be given some information to read and then will be asked to make a judgment about what they have read (on a likert scale - so this will just be a number). Following this, the judgment that each participant has made will need to be made visible to the other participants in the room. Ideally, this would happen by each participant seeing a screen (following making their own response) showing the responses that every participant in the room has made (including their own). So, this screen would appear the same for every participant in the room. I imagine this being in the format of each computer being assigned a letter, and this screen showing the letter of each computer paired with the judgment that has been made by the participant sat at that computer.
We will be using computers in a computer lab at University so they are connected through the University's central server but I'm not sure other than that. Not sure about numbers yet but it should be around 8 participants in the room at a time. In each session, all participants in that session will be exposed to the same treatments. All the computers would be using the same MediaLab file.
Thanks for the clarification. In theory, it sounds like this should be possible. MediaLab displays what is going on for the .que or .exp file that it runs and to which participants respond. So if you want more than one person to see what happens when a particular person runs and responds to a MediaLab .que file, you will most likely need all the display devices showing what goes on with the single drive where the MediaLab.exe program resides.
In practice. you will most likely need to play around with how the computers and display devices are set up in your particular situation. For example, you could try hooking up multiple monitors to a single computer. You could also try screen sharing using software designed for that purpose.