Reaction Time as feedback

[HF2021]

Hi all, is it possible to give participants their reaction times as trial-by-trial feedback in addition to whether or not they were correct? Thanks!

[Ting]

Hi - this is a great suggestion! I assume you are referring to the choice response? Do you have any specific ideas on how the feedback should be provided to the participants? Off the top of my mind, an intuitive way might just be displaying the time elapsed as participants are responding. When they lock in their choice, the timer freezes and thereby reports how fast they are.

Currently it's not possible, but we can probably schedule the feature to be included in the December grammar update.

[HF2021]

Yes, exactly, for choice responses. I think your description of how to implement it is perfect.  Thanks!

[Ting]

No problem! Really love this suggestion. Thank you.

[Ting]

Hi - just want to share an update. We have this developed internally and will include it in the December grammar update. Most likely it'll be available around the 20th of December.

[HF2021]

Thank you very much for implementing this feature.  We are very grateful and it works beautifully.  We would, however, like to make a suggestion either as a modification to the current “duration_timer” or in addition to it.  In the current version, the displayed time continues to increase after the participant has pressed a response key as long as the “correct/incorrect” feedback is displayed (which lasts 2 or 3 seconds after the participant’s response).  So while the participant does get a sense of elapsed time, they don’t see their exact response time.  One solution may be to freeze the running timer as soon as a response is made.  Another possibility, one that is more suited to our needs and in line with reaction time studies, is to display the response time only after the participant has responded.  That number would then remain on screen for a second or two, together with the correct/incorrect feedback (if that option is also selected).  Perhaps this could be a new function called “response_time”. 

Thank you once again to you and your wonderful team for having implemented this feature!

[Ting]

Hi - thanks for the feedback. Yes - we'll make the timer stop increasing as soon as the response is recorded. I'm not sure how the current behavior got through - it does not make sense to me either. Haha

As for your other suggestion, i.e., displaying the time only after a response has been recorded, that makes sense. I think what we will do is to modify the duration_timer property a little bit so that it can optionally accept an "onset" tweak: for your use case, the "onset" of the duration timer would be "response_end", as opposed to the default "response_start" as is.

We'll try to include both changes in the January grammar update!

[Ting]

Both of your suggestions turn out to be easy modifications - happy to report that they will make it into the January Grammar Update! We're planning to release the update on the 17th.

[Ting]

These changes are now live!