Escape a timeline prematurely without losing data

[wj-mitchell]

Hi everyone, I'm running a jsPsych_v7 task locally for an MRI study and it occurred to me that I do not know how I could or whether I could program the ability to escape the task prematurely but still retain the data. When I've programmed Python tasks in the past, I have been able to create a while loop or some key listener-type function to end the task when the 'escape' button was hit and save the data as-is, but I can imagine that it would prove slightly trickier in jsPsych.

Is there a function or tool similar to that in jsPsych? I searched a little through the tutorials and plugins but didn't see anything. Has anyone found a solution to a similar problem before? My first thought is I might be able to create a key listener function to jump to the end of the timeline and initiate that in the on_start of every jsPsych event.

Regardless, thank you!

[wj-mitchell]

Turns out the solution was simpler than I thought. I added the below code just after my initJsPsych event and it seems to work throughout the timeline!

// Example of initializing jsPsych
var jsPsych = initJsPsych({
  timeline: timeline,
  on_finish: function() {
    jsPsych.data.get().localSave('csv', session_date + '_' + subject_id + '.csv');
  }
});

// Creating an event listener to search for a keypress
document.addEventListener('keydown', function(event) {
  // Check if the 'escape' key was pressed
  if (event.key === 'Escape') { 
    // End the experiment prematurely
    jsPsych.endExperiment('The experiment was terminated early.'); 
  }
});