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video-button-response

Current version: 1.2.0. See version history.

This plugin plays a video and records responses generated by button click. The stimulus can be displayed until a response is given, or for a pre-determined amount of time. The trial can be ended automatically when the participant responds, when the video file has finished playing, or if the participant has failed to respond within a fixed length of time. You can also prevent a button response from being made before the video has finished playing. The button itself can be customized using HTML formatting.

Video files can be automatically preloaded by jsPsych using the preload plugin. However, if you are using timeline variables or another dynamic method to specify the video stimulus, you will need to manually preload the videos. Also note that video preloading is disabled when the experiment is running as a file (i.e. opened directly in the browser, rather than through a server), in order to prevent CORS errors - see the section on Running Experiments for more information.

Parameters

In addition to the parameters available in all plugins, this plugin accepts the following parameters. Parameters with a default value of undefined must be specified. Other parameters can be left unspecified if the default value is acceptable.

Parameter Type Default Value Description
stimulus array undefined An array of file paths to the video. You can specify multiple formats of the same video (e.g., .mp4, .ogg, .webm) to maximize the cross-browser compatibility. Usually .mp4 is a safe cross-browser option. The plugin does not reliably support .mov files. The player will use the first source file in the array that is compatible with the browser, so specify the files in order of preference.
choices array of strings undefined Labels for the buttons. Each different string in the array will generate a different button.
button_html HTML string '<button class="jspsych-btn">%choice%</button>' A template of HTML for generating the button elements. You can override this to create customized buttons of various kinds. The string %choice% will be changed to the corresponding element of the choices array. You may also specify an array of strings, if you need different HTML to render for each button. If you do specify an array, the choices array and this array must have the same length. The HTML from position 0 in the button_html array will be used to create the button for element 0 in the choices array, and so on.
margin_vertical string '0px' Vertical margin of the button(s).
margin_horizontal string '8px' Horizontal margin of the button(s).
prompt string null This string can contain HTML markup. Any content here will be displayed below the stimulus. The intention is that it can be used to provide a reminder about the action the participant is supposed to take (e.g., which key to press).
width numeric width of the video file The width of the video display in pixels.
height numeric heigh of the video file The height of the video display in pixels.
autoplay boolean true If true, the video will begin playing as soon as it has loaded.
controls boolean false If true, controls for the video player will be available to the participant. They will be able to pause the video or move the playback to any point in the video.
start numeric null If given a value, the video will start at this time point in seconds.
stop numeric null If given a value, the video will stop at this time point in seconds.
rate numeric null The playback rate of the video. 1 is normal, <1 is slower, >1 is faster.
trial_ends_after_video bool false If true, then the trial will end as soon as the video file finishes playing.
trial_duration numeric null How long to wait for the participant to make a response before ending the trial in milliseconds. If the participant fails to make a response before this timer is reached, the participant's response will be recorded as null for the trial and the trial will end. If the value of this parameter is null, then the trial will wait for a response indefinitely.
response_ends_trial boolean true If true, then the trial will end whenever the participant makes a response (assuming they make their response before the cutoff specified by the trial_duration parameter). If false, then the trial will continue until the value for trial_duration is reached. You can set this parameter to false to force the participant to view a stimulus for a fixed amount of time, even if they respond before the time is complete.
response_allowed_while_playing boolean true If true, then responses are allowed while the video is playing. If false, then the video must finish playing before the button choices are enabled and a response is accepted. Once the video has played all the way through, the buttons are enabled and a response is allowed (including while the video is being re-played via on-screen playback controls).
enable_button_after numeric 0 How long the button will delay enabling in milliseconds. If response_allowed_while_playing is true, the timer will start immediately. If it is false, the timer will start at the end of the video.

Data Generated

In addition to the default data collected by all plugins, this plugin collects the following data for each trial.

Name Type Value
response numeric Indicates which button the participant pressed. The first button in the choices array is 0, the second is 1, and so on.
rt numeric The response time in milliseconds for the participant to make a response. The time is measured from when the stimulus first appears on the screen until the participant's response.
stimulus array The stimulus array. This will be encoded as a JSON string when data is saved using the .json() or .csv() functions.

Simulation Mode

In data-only simulation mode, the response_allowed_while_playing parameter does not currently influence the simulated response time. This is because the audio file is not loaded in data-only mode and therefore the length is unknown. This may change in a future version as we improve the simulation modes.

Install

Using the CDN-hosted JavaScript file:

<script src="https://unpkg.com/@jspsych/plugin-video-button-response@1.2.0"></script>

Using the JavaScript file downloaded from a GitHub release dist archive:

<script src="jspsych/plugin-video-button-response.js"></script>

Using NPM:

npm install @jspsych/plugin-video-button-response
import videoButtonResponse from '@jspsych/plugin-video-button-response';

Example

Responses disabled until the video is complete
var trial = {
  type: jsPsychVideoButtonResponse,
  stimulus: [
    'video/fish.mp4'
  ],
  choices: ['0-5', '6-10','11-15','16-20','21-25','25+'],
  prompt: "<p>How many different fish are shown in the video?</p>",
  response_allowed_while_playing: false
};

Stock Footage provided by rjt98, from Pond5

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