How do I determine a correct button press on the fly?
I have looked through the manual, tutorials, and forum but haven't quite found what I am looking for yet. I am designing a masked-priming, lexical decision experiment. I looked at the lexical decision example in the tutorial but that experiment seems to have word and nonword targets alternating every 4th trial or so. I would like to make sure that the order of word and nonword targets is random across trials. Ideally I'd like the experiment procedure to work as follows, but I am amenable to other suggestions to get it to work in DirectRT 2006.
For each trial, I would like to randomly select a prime from a text file (called prime.txt). Each prime would then be paired with a predesignated word or nonword target taken from a different, single text file (called target.txt). It is critical that the prime and target are paired together based on the order in which they occur in their respective text files. I was able to get the random prime-target selection process to work in DirectRT. The trouble I am having is that in randomly selecting a prime and its designated target, I am not sure which key repsonse will be the correct one for each trial before hand because the target can either be a word or a nonword and would require a different key repsonse accordingly. Is there a way to set up the 'time' column in the directRT input file to determine the correct response on the fly (e.g. all word targets require the Z key and all nonwords targets require the / key)?
I could create another text file with the correct key responses because it would reflect the same prime-target order determined by the prime.txt and target.txt files. However, I'm not sure if I could access that file from the time column. If that is not possible, are there other ways of addressing the issue?
Thank you,
Brandon
