Millisecond Forums

Hi. I am posting here a plea for help with a type of experiment that is unfamiliar to me. It seems, in principle, to be a simple concept, however I have been foiled in my attempts to write the script. I am using Inquisit 4 for Windows. Specific help would be wonderful, but just some hints or sample scripts I should see would be appreciated too. Maybe it is very easy to program and I am just missing the obvious solution; that would be both great and humbling.

We want to present seven squares side-by-side, all at once. We have seven colors that the squares can be: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, pink. Each square will be a random color, but no color will be repeated in more than one square (i.e., each color will appear exactly once in each trial). The subject will use the mouse to click on any square he/she wants. At the end (say only 10 trials for now), we will want a report of how many times each color was selected.

So if you imagine seven squares in a row, we could call the square on the far left position1 (coordinates 14,50), then the one just to the right of that position2 (26,50), and so on. If we were to run one trial, we might get squares of these colors:
position1=blue
position2=yellow
position3=red
position4=pink
position5=violet
position6=orange
position7=green.
Then in the second trial, we would get a different arrangement of colors (e.g., the square in position1 could be green).

I am using squares in this example, but we will also use shapes that Inquisit cannot draw, such as ovals and diamonds. Therefore, our plan has been to use picture elements instead of shape elements.

We thought about using just one list of seven squares, but we couldn’t figure out how to assign random positions to each square. Then we thought about making a list of squares for each position, where the script would choose one of the seven colored squares from a list to put in position1, then select a square from a list for position2, etc., but the problem with that is we could repeat colors in other positions. For example, if the red square is selected for position1, we can’t figure out how to make it so the red square is NOT selected in any of the other six positions.

I do not have a sample script to paste here because we believe we found flaws in all of our ideas. I am of course not expecting anyone to write the whole script for us, but if there are hints that might help, that would be wonderful and appreciated. My Inquisit experience is limited mostly to IATs and some self-report items, so I don’t have much experience with logic statements, branches, and lots of other tools Inquisit offers (if those would even help us).

Thank you very much for reading this. Any thoughts on how we could write this script?