TOJ_Extension is an experiment program for a study (Redden, d'Entremont, & Klein, 2017b) that explored whether endogenous (i.e. self-directed) spatial attention can cause a prior entry effect (i.e. alter our conscious perception of the order that stimuli appear) within the context of a temporal order judgement (TOJ) task.
On most trials of this experiment, participants are asked to judge which of two lines (one vertical, one horizontal) appeared first (or second) on the screen. On the rest of the trials, a colour dot appears briefly at one of the two target locations, and participants are asked to indicate what the colour was on a colour wheel. For one of the two experimental blocks, participants are informed that the colour dot will appear more often on the left than the right, and are told the inverse for the other experimental block.
NOTE: This experiment program has been modified from the version used in Redden et al., 2017b. It has been updated to run properly with modern versions of KLibs, use degrees of visual angle for the sizing of all stimuli (so it can be replicated or demoed properly on smaller screens), and ask participants for their gender instead of their sex during demographics collection. If you intend to replicate this experiment, we highly recommend you use this branch to do so. However, you can still examine the original code in the master branch. Additionally, if you want to experience the experiment as close to as it was originally, with the minimum amount of changes required to run in modern KLibs, you can check out the updated branch here.
TOJ_Extension is programmed in Python 2.7 (3.3+ compatible) using the KLibs framework. It has been developed and tested on macOS (10.9 through 10.13), but should also work with minimal hassle on computers running Ubuntu or Debian Linux, as well as on computers running Windows 7 or newer with a bit more effort.
First, you will need to install the KLibs framework by following the instructions here.
Then, you can then download and install the experiment program with the following commands (replacing ~/Downloads with the path to the folder where you would like to put the program folder):
cd ~/Downloads
git clone https://github.com/TheKleinLab/TOJ_Extension.git
TOJ_Extension is a KLibs experiment, meaning that it is run using the klibs command at the terminal (running the 'experiment.py' file using Python directly will not work).
To run the experiment, navigate to the TOJ_Extension folder in Terminal and run klibs run [screensize],
replacing [screensize] with the diagonal size of your display in inches (e.g. klibs run 24 for a 24-inch monitor). If you just want to test the program out for yourself and skip demographics collection, you can add the -d flag to the end of the command to launch the experiment in development mode.
The experiment program allows you to choose whether participants should be asked to judge which shape was first or which shape was second. To specify which condition to run, launch the experiment with the --condition or -c flag, followed by first or second. For example, if you wanted to run the experiment asking which shape was second on a computer with a 20-inch monitor, you would run
klibs run 20 --condition second
If no condition is manually specified, the experiment program defaults to asking which shape was first.
Additionally, by default, responses in TOJ_Extension are made using the '8' and '2' keys on the keyboard numpad. If you want to test out TOJ_Extension on a computer that doesn't have a numpad (e.g. most laptops), you can open the experiment's parameters file (ExpAssets/Config/TOJ_Extension_params.py) and change the value of the variable use_numpad from 'True' to 'False'. This will map the TOJ response keys to the number row '8' and '2' instead.