Reaction times recorded on ipad

[CBill]

Hi,

As I mentioned in the earlier thread, I am planning on run a pcIBEX experiment using an iPad which we take into daycares. The design of the experiment is basically a binary truth value judgment task. However, I am also interested in collecting Reaction Time data, as we also have an hypothesis regarding the speed of responses between certain conditions.

As our iPads aren’t able to have SIM cards, we were planning on connecting them to the internet through mobile phone hotspots. However, I was wondering whether there might be any problems with collecting RT data through this kind of set-up. That is, would the reliability of the data be undermined by the inevitable variance in the connection of the iPad to the internet?

Thanks for your help.

[Jeremy]

Hi Cory,

All the experiment is technically run on the client side: the browser interprets the javascript code and executes it, which means that once it has downloaded the script, it doesn’t really need an internet connection anymore. Of course things are more subtle—there could be asynchronous scripts for example, but we can ignore that here. The browsers still need to download any resources you use though, but that won’t impact performance per se: it might just introduce preloading delays. So the reaction times will be accurate but it could be that, if preloading fails, audio playback starts late for example. But if you use .settings.log("play") on your audio element (still an example of course) then you should be able to subtract its timestamp from a key.settings.log()‘s timestamp (again, for example) to measure the actual time that elapsed between the start of playback and the key press.

I don’t use iPads so I can’t test it for you now, but if you can run python on it you might want to give a shot at a local setup.

[CBill]

Thanks for that information Jeremy. Very useful.

[Author]

Posts