Open ended response questions

1. Is it possible to allow participants to _not_ enter any response in DirectRt's open ended response?

2. Is it possible to measure the reaction time for the first key that is pressed in open ended responses?

Jan

Anything can be entered (even a single character) but nothing is not an option. As far as taking the RT to the first stroke--DirectRT hands open ended responses off to a Windows function that handles the text input. Consequently, DirectRT is not able to monitor the timing of events that happen during that period. It only knows when control is returned and so the RT always represents the time the subject spent entering their entire text response.

[I][Edited from related support email][/I]
[quote]We are trying to get Direct RT to measure the reaction time from the presentation of the stimulus until the participant BEGINS typing. Right now, it seems to be recording reaction time from the presentation of the stimulus until they finish typing their response and press "enter".[/quote]

Again, no way to do this yet--not in v2008 anyways. Only work around would be to have a prior stimulus like "press spacebar to start typing your answer" which would then be followed on the same trial by the [I]rt:text[/I] response. In the log version of the data file you could then pull out the RT for the spacebar--but this is not exactly the same as the RT for the first character in the text box. I just mention it in case it could help until we come up with a better solution.