Millisecond Forums

questions about output data

https://forums.millisecond.com/Topic24501.aspx

By psychostudy - 4/2/2018

Hi, II have some questions (mainly) regarding the output:

1. I know you can use the <data> / <summarydata> to record additional values and such, but a few measures (latency etc.) are always measured. Is there a way to filter those out beforehand (as in some questionnaires I'm not interested in latency)?
Related to this, as in some trials I am interested, is the latency measured as miliseconds?

2. Also kind of related, for one task I use <checkboxes> instead of <radiobuttons> due to the question page layout, and just assigned the option value to them. But in the outputfile, every single one is listed up, regardless of whether it was chosen or not. Is it possible to somehow filter out the unchecked <checkboxes> beforehand (since the output file gets quite long otherwise)?

3.This one is a bit different and not entirely related to output itself but: At one point, participants have to answer question about an image which is randomized. In order to know what picture they got, I used a value which gets randomized (using rand()) before the page) and is used as the /select for the pictures. and record it to the data. This seems to work fine, as the picture changes during different trials. I noticed though that in the output data the random value is not "whole" numbers but instead has decimal points, so if I used rand(1,4) to randomly choose between 4 pictures, I'd get numbers like 1,3494 and such. This makes it rather difficult since I don't know how the rounding works (e.g. if it rolls a 1.563, does it chose picture 1 or 2?). So is there a way to automatically round up?

thanks in advance for your answers.


By Dave - 4/3/2018

psychostudy - Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Hi, II have some questions (mainly) regarding the output:

1. I know you can use the <data> / <summarydata> to record additional values and such, but a few measures (latency etc.) are always measured. Is there a way to filter those out beforehand (as in some questionnaires I'm not interested in latency)?
Related to this, as in some trials I am interested, is the latency measured as miliseconds?

2. Also kind of related, for one task I use <checkboxes> instead of <radiobuttons> due to the question page layout, and just assigned the option value to them. But in the outputfile, every single one is listed up, regardless of whether it was chosen or not. Is it possible to somehow filter out the unchecked <checkboxes> beforehand (since the output file gets quite long otherwise)?

3.This one is a bit different and not entirely related to output itself but: At one point, participants have to answer question about an image which is randomized. In order to know what picture they got, I used a value which gets randomized (using rand()) before the page) and is used as the /select for the pictures. and record it to the data. This seems to work fine, as the picture changes during different trials. I noticed though that in the output data the random value is not "whole" numbers but instead has decimal points, so if I used rand(1,4) to randomly choose between 4 pictures, I'd get numbers like 1,3494 and such. This makes it rather difficult since I don't know how the rounding works (e.g. if it rolls a 1.563, does it chose picture 1 or 2?). So is there a way to automatically round up?

thanks in advance for your answers.



> 1. I know you can use the <data> / <summarydata> to record additional values and such, but a few measures (latency etc.) are always measured.
> Is there a way to filter those out beforehand (as in some questionnaires I'm not interested in latency)?

The <data> element only applies to trials run via  <block> elements. You can "filter out" latency by not logging any latency column per the <data> element's /columns.
. <survey> output is in a different format (wide: one column per question, only one row per participant) and cannot currently be customized, so no, you cannot suppress the logging of latency for surveypages / survey questions run via a <survey> element.

> Related to this, as in some trials I am interested, is the latency measured as miliseconds?

Yes, latency is measured in milliseconds.

> 2. Also kind of related, for one task I use <checkboxes> instead of <radiobuttons> due to the question page layout, and just assigned the option value to them.
> But in the outputfile, every single one is listed up, regardless of whether it was chosen or not.
> Is it possible to somehow filter out the unchecked <checkboxes> beforehand (since the output file gets quite long otherwise)?

No. For <checkboxes> all options are logged because -- as opposed to <radiobuttons> -- checkboxes in principle allow for selecting _multiple_ options, not only one.


> 3.This one is a bit different and not entirely related to output itself but: At one point, participants have to answer question about an image which is randomized.
> In order to know what picture they got, I used a value which gets randomized (using rand()) before the page) and is used as the /select for the pictures.
> and record it to the data. This seems to work fine, as the picture changes during different trials. I noticed though that in the output data the random value is not "whole"
> numbers but instead has decimal points, so if I used rand(1,4) to randomly choose between 4 pictures, I'd get numbers like 1,3494 and such.
> This makes it rather difficult since I don't know how the rounding works (e.g. if it rolls a 1.563, does it chose picture 1 or 2?).
> So is there a way to automatically round up?

You'll want to do

round(rand(1,4)) instead of just rand(1,4) if you want the result to be an integer.
By psychostudy - 4/4/2018

thanks, that helped!