Serial Reaction Time Task

I am a research student of Dr. Eric R. Igou at the University of Limerick, Ireland. We have a subscription to Direct RT and are in the process of trying to set up a Serial Reaction Time Task. for upcoming studies I would like to set up four horizontal boxes on the screen (to remain present throughout all trials), with an asterix acting as the stimulus to appear in (or above) one box in each trial at a predetermined sequence and extinguish for approximately 250ms before the appearing again in (or above) another box, again at a predetermined sequence. Would this be possible? I would be delighted at any help you may be able to give us as I am new to this programme.

Kind regards,

Lisa Healy

Hi Lisa,

This would definitely be possible. There's a few functions that you will need to become familiar with in order to complete this task.

When a trial first begins, you will need to setup the four boxes using four different commands. Each command to setup a single box will be contained within a 'screen'. A 'screen' is a single group of 'stim', 'loc', and 'time' columns.

An image will be required to act as the box you're requiring. For the first screen, you will need to denote that the image acting as a box is required as the stimulus. You will then need to specify the location of the box using values within the 'loc' column. [URL]http://www.empirisoft.com/directrt/help/directrt_loc_stimulus_location.htm[/URL]

Each screen will require a 'loc' value of 0 as its last value so that the screen doesn't clear itself upon presenting the next stimuli in line. You can control when the screen is cleared during a batch of screens; however once a new trial begins, the software will require that a clear command is called, which will erase everything currently visible. You can have an unlimited number of screens within a single trial.

When you're setting up images, such as the four boxes, you can simply call a time value of 0 - since you don't need to have the software pause at this event. When you run the screen containing text, such as the asterisks, you will need to specify a different time value, so that the screen doesn't immediately end. [URL]http://www.empirisoft.com/directrt/help/directrt_time.htm[/URL]

You may want to look through the samples and see if any of them contain similiar attributes to what you're trying to create. Your samples folder is most likely located at: "C:\DirectRT\Samples"

Regards,
Trevor