Common Problems (Solved)

MediaLab & DirectRT

MediaLab flashes a bright lavender screen between baseline collection and stimulus presentation.

To solve this issue, program baseline collection and stimulus presentation in DirectRT, which is software that comes with MediaLab. Questions can still be programmed in MediaLab, but item type 'DirectRT' will be used to present the stimuli.

DirectRT is a much faster program and will not flash this screen as a result.

AcqKnowledge

AcqKnowledge won't output more than 65,000 rows of data to excel.

This is an issue with the file type (.xlxs) that is output by AcqKnowledge. In other Excel file formats the row output limit is close to 1.5 million rows, however we have yet to figure out how to change the output file type.

To solve this issue, you can extract the data in sections, then combine the data outside of Excel.

If you are using focus areas to extract (Analyze > Focus Areas > Define Between Events) you can find cycles (Ctrl + F) apply whatever settings you wish to use, then select extract from focus areas then multiple sheets. This will output 1 Excel file per stimulus.

You can also decrease the interval width you are extracting at, although that is usually not ideal.

AcqKnowledge won't create focus areas for event markers/ttl pulses that are not input manually.

If you are using the "Default" event type for location of focus areas, the issue is that there is a difference between event type in manually input versus digitally input event markers/ttl pulses.

Instead of selecting the "Default" event type, select the "Stimulus Delivery" event type and try creating the focus areas again.

If that does not work, open the event palette by right clicking any waveform and selecting event palette. Ignore the first event labeled "append". Check the event types included in the event palette then change the event type setting in the focus areas window.

AcqKnowledge is outputting twice as many focus areas than were created.

This is likely because you created focus areas twice, or focus areas were already created in a non-original version of the file, prior to outputting the data.

If you have the original .acq file, use that file to create the focus areas. *Be sure to save the original, raw file!*

If you do not have the original .acq file, you will have to go through the output excel file and delete every other section of data. Be sure to confirm that you are deleting the duplicated data rather than deleting both sections of data for any particular stimulus. You can check this by comparing the values in each section to the suspected double.

AcqKnowledge will only record for a few seconds, then stop recording.

When creating your graph template, you likely did not change the default recording time (20 seconds).

Go back into your graph template then change the recording time to something well above the amount of time it takes to run a single participant in your study. Save this template then delete the old one so you don't use it by mistake.

I collected video with Acqknowledge, but it won't let me view this video when I'm trying to extract on a different computer.

First, make sure you downloaded the video and the .acq file to the new computer.

AcqKnowledge crashed during data collection. Can I get that data back?

No.

This is pretty rare (happened once in 2 years), but it is more likely to happen if you are continually messing with AcqKnowledge features and settings while collecting a participant's data.

Matlab

My matlab code worked on the lab computers but won't work on mine.

Run the code on the lab computer then type the following into the command line:

license('inuse') 

This will tell you what toolboxes the code requires to run. If you didn't download all of the toolboxes when you installed Matlab, you'll likely run into this. Download the missing toolboxes from the Matlab website and your code should run.

Tobii Glasses

Tobii Glasses will not calibrate.

You can do a couple of things to try and calibrate the glasses.

• Ask the participant to lean forward and stare at the calibration card.
• Slightly dim the lights in the room. (Turn them back up before start of session)
• Ask the participant to look slightly downwards at the calibration card.

My participant needs glasses to read. What do I do about the Tobii glasses?

You can double up the glasses, with the participants reading glasses placed first and then the Tobii glasses placed over those. You may have difficulty calibrating.

When transferring data from Tobii Glasses to the computer, I accidently overwrote the previous data. Can I get that data back?

Yes.

You can....