Special keys in E-Prime

E-Prime allows to use so-called special keys to define allowable and correct responses in E-Objects. Did you know that you can use almost all keys on your keyboard? Information about special keys is quite difficult to find, because it is hidden in E-Prime's help file. We hope that publishing this blog will help to find it quickly on the internet too.

If you look for {KEY} in the E-Basic Help (not to be confused with the E-Studio help, see the Help menu) you will get an overview of all possible keys. Please find a copy of this {KEY} entry below.

Lost in E-Prime?

There are a few excellent sources out there for getting help with your experiment. Apart from the book, which you of course already own, there's the regular E-Prime manual and getting started guide (both included with the E-Prime package). Especially if you already have a precise idea on the specific paradigm you plan on using, the System for Teaching Experimental Psychology (STEP) may provide valuable insights and solid starting points. Once you're stuck with a more specific issue, have a technical question, or are in any other need of support with your E-Prime experiment, E-Prime's developer PST provide brilliant support themselves. If your issue is of a more theoretical nature, or you just prefer crowd-sourcing solutions from academics, you could also post your questions to the E-Prime forum or mailinglist. The latter is maintained by a group of volunteers and remains, at the point of writing, remarkably active for such a prehistoric social network!

Important changes in E-Prime version 2.0.10.x

The E-Prime Production Release version 2.0.10.x introduced several useful features that were not available in E-Prime version 2.0.8.x. However, we recently discovered that some existing features (or their settings) have significantly changed since we published the E-primer. We will list those here below. In case you have decided to update E-Prime to version 2.0.10.x please read PST's documentation about this first. Please do not skip the issues we raise here: you will surely encounter some difficulties as soon as you start designing new or adapting existing experiments in version E-Prime 2.0.10.x (see here in case you upgrade an old experiment to an E-Prime 2.0.10.x file). Furthermore, when running experiments described in The E-Primer, you need to solve some of the issues described here. We are currently working on an addendum to our book that describes these changes. In the meantime, you can use the summary of the most important troubleshooting.

Tutorial: Validating Videos of Facial Affect

Today, I made a little experiment to validate videos of facial effect. Your institute probably has the Ekman faces CDROM, right? If you do, you can verify it has over a hundred pictures of very retro looking faces of people including Paul Ekman himself (if younger), enacting six different emotions – happy, angry, sad, disgusted, surprised, fearful – and a neutral baseline (sometimes). You could argue that enough is enough, these pictures are too old, or perhaps that emotions in the wild are rarely statically displayed. My reason was less obvious: for a project on the affective and cognitive effects of touch, somehow we ended up with this giant construct of a study which includes a bar in virtual reality, where one meets a 3D model displaying some emotion, then touches the participant, whose EEG we measure. I promise you it honestly makes sense and is great fun to do, but in the mean time, it’s clear that we need to validate animated (as opposed to static) faces to know in advance that the emotions are recognized consistently.

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