Millisecond Forums

+x

 

mb194503 - 10/11/2021

I'm currently testing out a new study and am running into an issue. When my RAs test the study in the Microsoft Edge browser, the instructions for the Stroop, Wason Rule Discovery, and Keep Track Task are instead displaying as a series of random symbols and letters. It seems to be some type of incompatibility with the .htm-based instructions as it does not occur on my Mac browsers nor on iOS devices. Suggestions on how to fix this issue? 

The browser used to launch a web experiment has no effect on how instruction pages are displayed. Inquisit does not use Edge to render HTML instruction pages, it embeds Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer has a number of obscure bugs -- the random characters you're seeing are likely due to the fact the IE -- for whatever reason -- fails to decompress the HTML pages before trying to render them. There've been isolated reports of this happening on a few systems, often inconsistently -- it sometimes happens, other times it does not for no clear reason. To check whether the compression theory is correct, right-click on one of the instruction pages when this is happening and select "Refresh" from the context menu.

I was able to test this out on a PC today (both Chrome and Edge browsers), and unfortunately using Refresh does not reload the page. It seems to be a consistent error with these three tasks. 

+x

 

mb194503 - 10/12/2021

I was able to test this out on a PC today (both Chrome and Edge browsers), and unfortunately using Refresh does not reload the page. It seems to be a consistent error with these three tasks. 

I've run through your study, Windows 10 system, launched via Edge, subject ID "support." Here are some screenshots from the respective HTML instruction pages, they all displayed fine (including those I did not screenshot):







So there doesn't appear to be a general issue here, but something about the specific WIndows systems you're using -- what that is (Some obscure IE plugin? IE connecting through a proxy? Some AV product scanning HTML and messing up its display in the process?) I unfortunately do not know

I'm a Mac person, so I'm not sure about the specifics of the on-campus PC that I am using. What is odd is that I was able to preview the instruction screens with no issue, but then when running the actual task I saw the errors in the instruction screens. Since the study works fine with your Windows set-up, with all of my Mac products, and with iOS, I'll just let the student participants know about this potential error prior to sign-up. Thank you for your help!