Hi Zeke,
If I correctly understand what you want to do, you would like output in the form of how long passed between the appearance of your trigger image and whichever key the participant must press in response (the z key for a horizontal line target and the m key for the vertical line target). I got this idea from when you wrote in your original post that “the stim consists of 9 images.” If I’m interpreting this correctly, that means all we need to focus on is the key press participants must do in response to the trigger image. If so, that should be relatively straightforward.
I modified the file you uploaded to reflect one way to do this. I took the second set of rows from the file you uploaded and modified them. The target image in this case is image2 because it is accompanied by the 60ms tone. The primary change is that I moved the values of “rt:44<13,50<14” to the stim value for image2. By doing this, the rt that gets recorded in short data file should be the amount of time that passes from the onset of image2 in this trial and when the key was pressed, which should be right in the "middle" (e.g., whenever the trigger image appears in the random order of all 9 images) of the entire stimuli set of 9 images.
You may also have noticed that I changed the value of the style cell to 2 and added “,full” to the time cell in the stim2 trial. Your original post had stim 2 with a time value of 150ms. If you want to display the image for a certain amount of time and have participants press a key in response to the target, an easy way to accomplish this to create a new style line in the style file of your experiment with a MinMax value of 0-150. By using “,full” after defining the z and m response keys, stim2 will appear for 150ms no matter when the response key is pressed; instructions for this can be found in the Style Editor > Min Max – Setting RT Limits section of the DirectRT online help guide. Of course, you can match all of the other values in styles 1 and 2 of the style file so that all the images are presented in a similar manner except for the time onscreen.
Please let me know if this is what you were looking for. If you need more help or something different, I’ll be happy to help you find your desired solution.
Cheers!
Psychboiler.