Dear forum
I have a question regarding some ambiguity in the explanation of the noreplace function in the trials attribute. My apologies if this information is present elsewhere. I could not locate an answer on the forums of the Inquisit help information.
I understand the following explanations which are provided on the website;
The following block randomly selects either testtrial or distractortrial for each of its 12 trials. The testtrial is run exactly 8 time and distractortrial is run 4 times.
<block myblock>
/ trials=[1-12=noreplace(testtrial, testtrial, distractortrial)]
</block>
However, it is unclear here exactly what the result of this example would look like.
Specifically, does the noreplace function select without replacement from the list of 3 trials, before then resetting the list, and repeating this procedure until n trials selected equals 12? This would result in outputs like the one below, whereby the “testtrial” is run exactly 8 times and “distractortrial” is run 4 times, however every sequence of 3 trials has 2 “testtrial” and 1 “distractortrial”;
[testtrial, testtrial, distractortrial,
testtrial, distractortrial, testtrial,
distractortrial, testtrial, testtrial,
testtrial, distractortrial, testtrial,]
or, does the noreplace function repeat the sequence of listed trials to length 12, before starting selection without replacement? This would result in outputs like the one below, whereby the sequence of trials is completely random, though is dictated to present 8 “testtrials” and 4 “distractortrials”;
[testtrial, testtrial, testtrial,
distractortrial, distractortrial, testtrial,
distractortrial, testtrial, distractortrial,
testtrial, testtrial, testtrial,]
or is something else happening?
I would be very grateful for any insight into this query.
Thank you very much! :)