Minimum inter trial interval

Hello,

I found that when the inter-trial-interval is set very short (ex. 0 msec), there is a gap of 250-450 msec between the last event code of the previous trial and the first event code of the current trial. Is there any trick to make this gap shorter?
I guess this gap is a dead time required for the computer to prepare the trial data and write it in the record. If this is true, is it possible to shorten this gap by disabling time-consuming data processing (ex. disabling the analog data saving)?

Thank you

Does your task not have any ITI? What will be a problem if you cannot shorten it?

Sorry, perhaps I was unclear. We have an ITI between trials (1-3 seconds). We're using a button to initiate the next trial in our hand reaching task. Subjects start preparation for the upcoming trial when they push the button. Therefore, we want to keep checking the status of button as much as possible even during the ITI. Unfortunately, the button is real hardware, meaning the subject can access the button at any time (we cannot control this, as you might be able to for a task that uses saccades). Our issue is not with shortening the length of the ITI, but with shortening the length of this "dead time gap." During this gap, our script cannot send event codes related to the push of the button, and this presents a problem for monitoring when the subject tries to initiate a new trial. So, we want this time to be as short as possible. Does this make sense?

The gap of 250-450 msec seems pretty long, unless you load multiple movies. What will be most helpful is to run the task on an SSD, if you are not doing so already.

If you are using TaskObjects, you can try pre-loading to reduce the stimulus creation time. See the "task\userloop\2 movie preloading" example. It does not work with adapter-based stimuli.