Tuesday 1 June 2010

E-prime, Voice Key and the Serial Response Box



Northern Teutoburg Forest, Bielefeld












Hello, today I'd like to share with you the solution to a problem I had in programming a simple naming task in E-prime. The experiment requires participants to name a list of common objects while reaction times are recorded. In order to collect accurate to millisecond reaction times you need to connect a microphone to the PC on which Eprime has been installed. To do so, you need to connect the mic to the Serial Response Box that, in turns, is connected to the PC. Once you have done that, the mic can be used a voice key.

This makes collecting naming latencies quite easy, if it works. In fact, at least in my case, the microphone did not detect any signal. This problem was connected to the fact that it is not possible to change the sensitivity of the microphone from the SRB but only using some E-script. The bad news is that this information is not on the manual. The good side is that the e-scritp you need to fix the problem is this:

Debug.Print SRBox.VoiceKeyTripLevel
SRBox.VoiceKeyTripLevel = 0

These two E-basic lines basically set the SRB voice key at the default level.
Cheers
Michele