User`s guide

E-Prime User’s Guide
Chapter 2: Using E-Studio
Page 54
the Duration tab on the Prime object. Note the Data Logging (Time Audit Only), Timing Mode
(Event), and PreRelease (0ms) fields. These fields must be checked for each of the critical
objects in the trial procedure.
The “Time Audit Only” option in the Data Logging field logs the duration information for later
analysis (i.e., OnsetTime, OnsetDelay, DurationError). The Time Audit Only option should be
used on critical displays without responses, such as the Fixation and Prime displays. Objects
collecting a response (e.g., Probe) should set Data Logging to “Standard” in order to collect the
response data in addition to the duration related data.
2.8.2 Providing early graceful abort of a block
There is one elaboration to consider adding to the experiment to allow for a more graceful, early
termination of running experiments. When running an experiment, one normally runs from the
start to the finish of the experiment with the automatic selection of trials. E-Prime permits an
experiment to be aborted prior to the normal termination of trials by pressing the Ctrl+Alt+Shift
keys simultaneously. This is fine for debugging and aborts the experiment immediately. E-Prime
provides another method for putting in code to check to see if a special key sequence has been
entered. If so, a List object can be terminated at the end of a trial or block, and all of the
accumulated data can be saved. This alternative method uses a special function,
GetUserBreakState, which returns a “1” if the Ctrl+Shift keys have been set, and “0” if not. The
value of GetUserBreakState is set until the experiment explicitly resets the state to zero with the
following script:
SetUserBreakState 0
In this experiment, we add an Inline object at the end of the TrialProc and check the state of
GetUserBreakState. If it is “1”, the running DesignList is terminated using the
DesignList.Terminate command. The UserBreakState is then reset to zero to run the next block.