Dear Researchers,

We have just been informed by our upstream provider of a database outage that has unfortunately led to partial loss of uploaded stimulus files. While the occurrence of such incidents is completely out of our control, we are assessing and implementing new measures for avoiding similar issues in the future. At this point, our analysis indicates that this will only affect you if you:

• Have collaborators who use identically named stimulus files across different FindingFive accounts.
  
• Use the US server (the EU server is not affected)
  

Hi - Does FindingFive have a feature that allows the participants verbal response to advance to the next trial? For example, the participant sees a picture of a "dog", as soon as the participant says "dog" it advances to the next image. 
On the other side of the same coin, is there a feature that automatically turns on the mic/recording feature with the onset of the trial?

Hi researchers,
Two bugs were patched over the weekend:

(1) Deleting studies created prior to 2019 could have resulted in an error because older session documents did not have the cash compensation field. This issue was patched.

(2) In some cases, the "mouse_reset" template might throw a conflict location error: "the "reset_location" already contains a visible stimulus.", if the mouse reset template is used to generate trials more than once in a study. This issue was patched.

Let us know if you have any questions!

Dear Researchers,
 
We are happy to announce the development of a new property within our existing trial templates: follow-up responses! Please find full documentation of this property here: https://help.findingfive.com/api/trial-templates.html?highlight=follow_up. 
 
What it does
This new property allows you to specify follow-up responses, based on participants’ initial responses to a stimulus. For example, if participants select the choice “other” in an initial response, you can use this trial template to trigger a follow-up text-box, allowing participants to explain their selection in more detail. 
 
Recommended usage
This property is recommended for situations where only follow-up responses are required. You may instead wish to branch participants into conditions with different stimuli, responses, and tasks, based on their responses in an initial trial. In these scenarios, please use our conditional branching feature instead! Details on conditional branching can be found here: https://news.findingfive.com/2021/01/08/tutorial-conditional-branching/  
 
Pain points addressed
Development of this new property means you no longer have to use conditional branching for simple follow-up responses!
 
We hope you find this new property helpful! Questions? Reply in this thread, and we will answer!

I have trials with three sounds playing. With the first two sounds I have a + appear and a X appear with the last sound. These appear just for the sound and then disappear using duration and delay. The problem is that the +s and X do not appear in the same location even though I use "vertical_center" for the trial template or "alignment": center for the stimuli. If I do these the first + appears on the left, the second in the center, and the X on the right. Here is the code:
    "PracticeTrials": {
    "type": "AFC",
    "stimuli": [["dental_CV1", "Plus_Sign1_dental", "alveo_CV2", "Plus_Sign2_alveo", "dental_CV3", "X_Sign_dental_alveo_dental"]],
    "responses": ["First"],
    "vertical_center": true
    }

I have also tried using "which" and "location". This puts them in the center, but the first + is higher with the second + a little lower and the X lower.
  "PracticeTrials": {
    "type": "AFC",
    "stimuli": [{"which": ["dental_CV1", "Plus_Sign1_dental", "alveo_CV2", "Plus_Sign2_alveo", "dental_CV3", "X_Sign_dental_alveo_dental"], "location": [2,2,2,2,2,2]}],
    "responses": ["First"]
    }

I simply need each one to appear in the same location after the previous one disappears. How do I do that?

Dear Researchers,

A top priority of FindingFive is to ensure the consistency of participant data: two participants taking similar actions on a trial should lead to similar participant data as recorded by FindingFive (for your statistical power!). This is a somewhat novel challenge in online studies: in the good old days when participants were invited to the lab in person, we as researchers could control the experimentation equipment. When studies are conducted over the web, however, participants' unique computer hardware specs, software versions, and Internet speed can all be very different. These differences introduce potential sources for the inconsistencies in the participant data collected in an experiment.

What's new
In the most recent update to FindingFive that became effective on Tuesday 3/30/2021, we have further improved the consistency of participant data within the same study session. This is achieved by ensuring that participants in the same study session will always experience the study the same way. Technically, when a researcher launches a new session, FindingFive now "freezes" the behavior of the FindingFive Grammar at the time of the session's launch, for this particular session. Any further updates to the FindingFive Grammar will not affect how the launched session will behave. 

No action required
There's no action required to take advantage of this new feature. This new feature is invisible to either researchers or participants. Researchers will launch a new session as usual, and the new mechanism automatically kicks in.

Potential downside
As the FindingFive Grammar system is now frozen for an active session, it also means that any bug fixes to the Grammar system will not retroactively apply to active sessions. Please preview your study thoroughly and carefully before launching a session to make sure your study runs as expected.

If your active session contains undesirable behavior after launching, FindingFive will not able to fix it for your active session anymore. You will now need to stop it and launch another session even after we fix the bug. Bug fixes will no longer be applied to active sessions.

Comments?
Please leave a message below to let us know your thoughts and comments!

Besides being able to use some limited HTML tags in trial stimuli, are there any plans to introduce anything like CSS to alter trial appearance? For example, could there be any way to change response buttons from orange to a different color? Or change the background color from white to grey?

Dear Researchers,

We are excited to announce the availability of a new stimulus type, tokenized images! The documentation on this new stimulus can be found here: https://help.findingfive.com/api/stimuli...ized_image

What it does
As the name suggests, a tokenized image stimulus can be used to display a list of images in sequence. If you have used our tokenized text or tokenized audio stimuli, the tokenized image stimulus is our effort to bring similar functionality to images.

Recommended usage
The tokenized image stimulus is best at simulating GIF-like animation, and yet with precise timing control for how long each frame / image token should be displayed. This has many uses in psychological studies. For example, in visual priming studies, it is common to present the priming image for only a split of a second, and then collect a response on the actual target image. This new stimulus will make the creation of such stimuli easy and flexible.

Pain points addressed
Before the introduction of this new stimulus, in order to present several images in sequence, researchers needed to use a trial-yoking technique that has the side effect of a "flashing screen". Using that technique also limits the options in randomizing trials at the block level. The new tokenized image stimulus can now be used instead.

Future work
The tokenized image stimulus does not support a self-paced option, unlike the tokenized text and tokenized audio stimuli. We are planning to add this support eventually. If you have a particular use for a self-paced tokenized image stimulus, please leave a reply below to let us know!

Hello,
In my study participants see a sequence of letters and need to respond 'yes' or 'no' as to whether that sequence was correct or not.
Currently, it seems that they can respond without waiting to see the entire sequence. Is there a way to limit response options until the end of the sequence?

If possible, I feel it would be helpful to have the ability to increase the number of participants in a session, especially since we cannot have more than one session for the same study. If we can extend the session, why not add more participants to it? Thanks!