Conditional skipping, unconditional skipping, and randomization

Hi Blair & John -- hope you can help me with this problem!

Here's the setup: I have a memory test in which participants see a stimulus and respond old/new. In both cases, I want to present feedback. I currently have it set up to use both a "skip to" and "skip" function. If they say "old," the program skips to the appropriate feedback (specified in "skip1" in the que file), and from there to the next target face (specified in "skipto" in responses.xls). If they say "new," the program skips to the appropriate feedback (specified in "skip2" in the que file).

So far, so good. But here's the problem: I want to randomize the stimulus presentation order. The problem, though, is that when the program randomly pulls the final stimulus, the "skipto" value in responses.xls sends them to the end-of-test instruction screen. Obviously, if the program pulls the final stimulus anywhere other than at the very end of the task, some of the stimuli will not be presented.

Is there any way around this? Or am I going to have to create one pre-randomized stimulus list and not use the randomization functionality of ML?

Best,
kim

Here might be a helpful blurb from the 2006.1 improvements list:

[quote]
[I]Improved skip functionality[/I]. Instead of having to explicitly name the variable you want to skip to, you can simply enter +1, +2, +3, +n, etc. items. MediaLab will automatically skip that many items without needing to know the name of a "skipto" variable--it will simply resume wherever it ends up. This is especially nice when the item being skipped to might be randomly determined.
[/quote]

Think that could help?
Blair

Perfect -- works like a charm! k

Okay, so it's all working beautifully on my computers, but I have a colleague at another university who has offered to collect some data and now the program won't run on her computers. The program presents only one trial and then skips to the end of the questionnaire. I'm running v2006, and she's running v2004. I've never had problems running v2006 programs on computers with v2008, but maybe this is something about v2004? Any ideas?

Yes, I think that feature was added sometime during the 2006 version.