Hi!
I've noticed some peculiarities with the timeout and mask attributes in openended questions and I was wondering if anybody had the same experience or has an idea of how to solve these issues.
1. I specified a timeout of a minute in an openended question attribute. When I ran the program on some computers (with windows vista), I could simply proceed to the next trial by pressing enter regardless of the time specified in the timeout - which I think is the standard way it works. However, on other computers (so far observed only with windows 7), I couldn't proceed to the next trial before the minute was over. The question would simply remain on the screen until the timeout. And then the most peculiar thing I noticed was that when I ran the experiment again on the same (windows 7) computer after having worked on the script (without changing anything on the openended question though!) on a different computer, it suddenly did let me proceed to the next trial by pressing enter. Very strange. Has anybody else experienced anything like this before? It could be a serious problem for me, because I eventually want to run the experiment on the web and thus have no control over what computers it will run on.
2. I'm having some trouble with the mask attribute. In want participants to respond to a series of openended question with letters only. I used the mask = alphabetic attribute. Now the odd thing is that I can still enter other characters. However, if I do that, I can't enter anything anymore in any following trial. There isn't even a visible text courser anymore. It's not a huge problem for me if participants enter other characters, so I can live without this restriction. But I'd still like to understand what's going on here. Does anybody have an idea on that?
Thanks in advance for your help!