Is it possible to present videos during ITI?

Hi,

My task is a cooperation task between the subject and an avatar. We want to make the avatar always be presented on the screen to convince the subject that it's a real partner playing with him. What I have tried is to reduce the ITI to 0 and add a video of the avatar at the beginning of each trial. But it seems that MonkeyLogic needs time to prepare for the next trial so it always exceeds the expected ITI and the screen will still be blank between trials.

Is there any other solution?

Thanks.

I think your approach, reducing the ITI to 0, is the best. Since NIMH ML does need time to prepare for the next trial, the ITI cannot be truly 0 but will be minimum.

A new trial starts after the ITI, so there is no point in adding the video at the beginning. If you do not turn off the avatar movie at the end of the trial, however, the last shown frame will stay on the screen throughout the ITI. By the way, if you are using the scene framework, the idle() command turns off stimuli.

If the avatar has to be animated all the time, you can repeat the task multiple times within a trial without going through the ITI. You may need more memory to load all the stimuli and hold the data.

Thanks. I deleted the idle() at the end of the timing file, so now we can see the last frame of the avatar during the exceeded time.

It's not perfect but it works.