Directory Structure

The experiment consists of the following files and directories:

Pictures                 : directory containing images used in phase 3
itemlist_<name>.txt      : item list files
phase1_pre-rating.ebs2   : runnable file for phase 1
phase1_pre-rating.es2    : source file for phase 1
phase2_assignment.ebs2   : runnable file for phase 2
phase2_assignment.es2    : source file for phase 2
phase3_report.ebs2       : runnable file for phase 3
phase3_report.es2        : source file for phase 3
phase4_post-rating.ebs2  : runnable file for phase 4
phase4_post-rating.es2   : source file for phase 4
resting_state.ebs2       : runnable file for resting state phase
resting_state.es2        : source file for resting state phase

The .ebs2 files are the runnable EPrime procedures for each of the five phases. EPrime will create several other files upon running a phase. They are not important, you can ignore them.

Subject specific directory

The experiment creates a sub-directory in the experiment directory for each subject. The directory name reflects the subject number and the session number (usually 1 because this experiment has only one session per participant).

Example:

subject_<subject number>_session_1
Attention:In order to achieve correct data collection all phases must write the data for a subject into the same sub-directory. It is important that the correct subject and session numbers are set at the beginning of each phase. Also note that the session number should always be 1 - the session number does NOT reflect the phase in the experiment.

When the phases haven been run the content of a subject specific directory may look the following:

list_data.dat         : List data in Eprime data format (loaded by experiment)
list_data.csv         : List data in CSV format (Excel compatible)
item_data_phaseN.dat  : Item table after phase N in EPrime data format (loaded by experiment)
item_data_phaseN.csv  : Item table after phase N in CSV format (Excel compatible)
phaseN.debug          : Debug output of phase N

Additional .edat2, .txt and .xml files are generated by EPrime.

Each phase loads the item table (.dat) saved by the phase before and writes the item table extended by the data collected during the phase to a different file having _pahseN at the end. The .dat files are used by the experiment to save the data. If you need to work with the data you can load the .csv version of the file directly into MS Excel or Matlab.

The .txt contain the EPrime event logs from the execution of the phases. You can use these logs to anaylse the answer timing of the participant. The log files can be transformed into .csv form with the EPrime Log File Parser.

The .debug files contain the messages written to the ‘Debug’ Window in EPrime during execution of the phase.

Running phases on different computers

The experiment consists of phases conducted inside the MRI scanner as well as outside of the scanner. Thus the different phases will most likely run on disparate machines. Because later phases depend on data from earlier phases the subject specific directory has to be copied over to the machine running the next phase before commencing execution of the next phase.