[I][edited from support email][/I]
If I tell DirectRT to download images from a network, rather than the hard drive, will presentation time suffer? Will reaction-time suffer (even if I am saving data to the hard drive)?
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[I][edited from support email][/I]
If I tell DirectRT to download images from a network, rather than the hard drive, will presentation time suffer? Will reaction-time suffer (even if I am saving data to the hard drive)?
For sensitive RT and display work it is usually best to have the stimuli stored locally. However, you can TRY it and see if your network can handle it. DirectRT, e.g., prepares all the screens of a given trial before the trial starts--it does so during the intertrial interval. So you could try running it with the images stored on a server and see the LoadTime column in the log version of the data file. Make sure your intertrial interval (as defined in your style file) is [I]at least[/I] as long as it takes to generate the trials. This value will be longer if your images are being drawn from some other networked machine--and it will probably also be higher to the extent that multiple machines are trying to access the images (or other files) at the same time. Generally, it's only if you do not give DirectRT enough time between trials to prepare that you will run into timing problems.
Hope that helps,
Blair