Ensuring distinct touches

Hi Chris,

I am trying to ensure that the monkey releases his touch from the entire ipad monitor in between touching a starting point and touching the target image.
Currently, the animals show a tendency to just swish their hand across the screen without releasing, which can lead to persevering behaviors (ie if the monkey prefers swishing right over left). It is not clear that making the monkey release for some time will actually help, but it may, and I already tried a few other tricks to overcome persevering behaviors that did nothing and it’s making it impossible to record meaningful data from some animals.

I tried to make the entire window a fixation_point that gets triggered to monitor this. The issue is that this entire window necessarily surrounds the starting window. You taught me that
A fixation point updates the variable assigned to trigger_flaghttps://mworks.github.io/documentation/latest/components/fixation_point_stimulus.html#trigger-flag only when the watched position transitions from being inside/outside the fixation window to outside/inside it.
So I am assuming this is why my monitoring doesn’t get triggered. So either I need a monitor with a start_point_sized hole in it (and then I have the issue that I also want to register a release there, but this could be solved with an AND monitoring of that window perhaps) or we need a touch_point that doesn’t have this trigger property. I don’t know how easy that is to implement on your side, but it would likely be a much more versatile solution.
The only thing I see I could do myself is making tiles surrounding the fixation point everywhere, but that seems very cumbersome.

Please let me know if you understand what my problem is, agree with how it comes about or if you have other ideas and what you think could be done (when) to fix it.

Thanks a lot

Alina

Hi Alina,

I think you’ve explained the issue correctly.

Could you just wait for touch_in_progress to become false after the monkey touches the starting point? Then you would know that the monkey removed its hand from the screen before proceeding.

You could also insist that touch_in_progress become false while trigger_flag for the starting window is still true, so that the monkey must release the screen from the starting position. Or you could insist that touch_in_progress be false before the touch enters the target window, so that even if the monkey does slide its hand to the target, it would have to release and touch the target again to complete the task.

Do any of those approaches sound like they would work?

Cheers,
Chris

Hi,

This sounds very promising, I will play with this and see if it works out.

Thanks!!