Creating Instructions

Instructions can be presented as text stimuli like those created in the previous section. Inquisit also provides a built-in facility for presenting instruction pages in html or plain text. In this tutorial, we will use this facility to present a summary of the participant's performance.

The summary page is defined as follows:

 
 <page summary> 
^Below is a summary of your average response time for two different configurations. 
^^Configuration 1: <% item.targetAlabel.1 %> with <% item.attributeAlabel.1 %>, <% item.targetBlabel.1 %> with <% item.attributeBlabel.1 %>
^    <%block.compatibletest.meanlatency%> milliseconds
^^Configuration 2: <% item.targetAlabel.1 %> with <% item.attributeBlabel.1 %>, <% item.targetBlabel.1 %> with <% item.attributeAlabel.1 %>
^    <%block.incompatibletest.meanlatency%> milliseconds
^^Did you respond much more quickly on one of the configurations than the other? If so, that configuration may be more consistent with your attitudes about these categories. 
^^Thank you for your participation. Please press 'Continue' to end the test.
</page>

The "^" character is used to force a line break when the page is presented on screen. The page also includes several properties enclosed in "<% %>". When the page is displayed, these properties are replaced by the actual underlying property values. For example, <% block.compatibletest.meanlatency %> is replaced by the mean latency on the block named "compatibletest", and <% item.targetAlabel.1 %> is replaced by the first item in the item set named "targetAlabel".

Next we'll create the instruct element which determines how instruction pages are presented, and how the user navigates through them.

<instruct>
/ nextlabel = "Continue"
/ lastlabel = "Continue"
/ prevkey = (0)
/ inputdevice = mouse
/ windowsize = (90%, 90%)
/ screencolor = (0,0,0)
/ fontstyle = ("Arial", 3%)
/ txcolor = (255, 255, 255)
</instruct>

The inputdevice attribute specifies that users can navigate through the instructions by clicking the mouse. The nextlabel and lastlabel specifies the text label for the navigation button that advances to the next page, or that advances past the last page. By setting prevkey to "0", we ensure that users can not navigate backwards through the pages. Finally, we've defined look and feel of instruction pages using the screencolor, fontstyle, and windowsize commands.

Creating Text Stimuli

Creating Trials