Implementing an alert box showing during an experiment

[cedricbatailler]

Hi there!

I had a random thought and realized I don't know how I would approach a problem. Let's say that you're conducting an experiment with repeated trials where a participant has to pick a correct response among two possible ones, as fast as they can. A risk, here, could be that the participant goes so fast that they basically doesn't care anymore about being correct.

To mitigate that risk, an approach could be to add a message shown in a trial if a specific condition is met (for example, four errors in a row). To do so, I think that the easiest way to implement it would be to add a conditional trial (jsPsych meaning) for each trial (experimental psychology meaning).

But what if I wanted a modal to appear instead? How would you approach this problem?

I don't need a low-level answer to this question, but I am really interested in your insights.

Cheers,
Cedric

[jodeleeuw]

Hey @cedricbatailler,

That's a great question. I agree that a conditional trial is probably the most "jsPsych-y" way to do this right now. Three other options come to mind:

1. If the modal were specific to a certain kind of trial then you could implement it as part of the plugin.
2. The extensions interface could probably support this as well. I think the tricky bit here would be triggering the modal at the appropriate time. If you can run the right logic in the trial's on_load handler then that might work.
3. You could probably just dump the code for the modal directly into the on_load handler. The advantage of the extension would be better abstraction and some options for state management.