Choice response location

[wbushong]

Forgive me if this is somewhere in the documentation, but I can't find any details about how to modulate where choice responses are displayed. I have a complex trial consisting of serial presentation of an image in the center-middle of the screen (position 5), which disappears, and then is followed by two audio stimuli, and then finally a choice response. The response appears in the lower third of the screen, but I want the response to be right in the middle. 
It seems like this has something to do with the image -- even though it disappears well before the response appears, it's like it's still "taking up" the center-middle position. When I remove the image from the trial and just have the two audio stimuli, the response appears in the center-middle, just as I want. Is there a way to override the location of the choice response and force it to appear in the center-middle of the screen?

[noah.nelson]

Hi Wednesday, this is such a great question so thank you for asking!

Although we do not currently support control of the general screen position for responses in the way you are describing, there is a hack that should work to give you about the same result: If you put your response into a separate trial template, it will appear in the center middle as you noted. You can leverage this by making one template for the stimuli (and set the trial to auto advance) and another template for the response, then using the "alternate" (or "alternate_random") ordering pattern to yoke those templates together at the block level (cf. https://hub.findingfive.com/study-gramma...ock/#order).

When done "correctly", the result should be a seamless flow as though the stimuli and response were on a single trial. A few things to note:
1. be sure to set "auto_advance" to true for your trial template with only your stimuli, or else you'll get a continue button between stimuli and response (https://hub.findingfive.com/study-gramma...to_advance)
2. the progress bar at the top of the screen will progress independently for the stimuli-only trials and the response-only trials. With this approach, there is no way around this other than to disable the display of the progress bar altogether (https://hub.findingfive.com/study-gramma...ogress_bar)

Sorry that it's a bit of a hacky solution, but I think it should work! Please let us know how it goes or if you have any questions, and we do hope to expand the capabilities of researchers to control these kinds of trial screen layout properties in the near future.

Best of luck with your research!

[wbushong]

Thanks, Noah! This is very helpful!!