N-back task

[jarvis24]

You could certainly do this in DirectRT. I think you could do it in MediaLab but I'd have to play around with it. Can you send me what you have so far and I'll take a look?
-Blair

[jarvis24]

This is definitely easier to pull off in DirectRT. But if you are willing to twist some arms and legs, I think MediaLab will do it for you. I've attached a modification of the sample you sent me. Details of the arm twisting follow...

I changed your fill in the blanks to essays. I did this because essays have a "key press monitoring" feature. Note that each item has a "k32" parameter which basically tells MediaLab to watch for the spacebar being pressed during the item and write a timestamp of the occurrence to a special datafile named after that variable. OK, so then your d2 parameter took care of the 2-second time limit. I added a t1000 parameter to move the big essay text box off screen. I also added a param(a2,t.5) to the question wording to center the numbers vertically and horizontally. Finally, I created a quickstyle file (nback.mlq) to create a larger font for the numbers. Data analysis for this will be a bit of a dog because each number gets its own keypress file. It wasn't designed for this type of task, but I think it works. Let me know if you want to try it in DirectRT because, unlike MediaLab, DirectRT could do this kind of thing in its sleep.

Hope that helps,
Blair

[jarvis24]

Regarding DirectRT approach, see also: http://www.empirisoft.com/support/showthread.php?p=17379