This tutorial demonstrates how to change difficulty level of the task by directing participants to a different spreadsheet based on the specified criteria. You might want to use this paradigm to, for example, adjust task difficulty level based on participants' Reaction Time, score, or time elapsed. In order to do that, we use a Change Difficulty (Spreadsheet) screen component.
In this example, we use a Memory Intrusion task with two spreadsheets: Easy (with fewer words to remember) and Hard (with more words to remember). We want participants to start with trials from the Easy spreadsheet and then if they correctly respond to 7 or more trials in the test phase, they will continue to trials from the Hard spreadsheet. If they score less than 7, they will be directed to the end screen of the task.
Firstly, in the SCREEN tab, we add a Scorer component to score participant's answers. We also add Save Accuracy component to store the number of correct and total answers so that we can later display them to participants and use them for the Change Difficulty logic. We add the Change Difficulty (Spreadsheet) component and put a number of minimum trials we want participants to go through before switching to another spreadsheet. In this tutorial, we want to show at least 7 trials because if participants get first 7 trials correct they will move onto the Hard spreadsheet and if they don't, they will continue with more trials, until they score 7 correct or run out of test trials. In the Conditions, we put the name of the Field we stored the number of correct trials to in our Save Accuracy component (here 'correct') and set a condition: if the Value of the Field 'correct' is greater than our Threshold of 7 we will go towards a Harder Direction. We give the names of the Spreadsheets (easier = Easy to harder = Hard) and our Change Difficulty logic is complete. Now if participants score 7 or more on the memory test, they will switch to harder trials and at the end see finish_Hard screen with scores for both Easy and Hard trials, but if they score below 7, they will finish the Easy spreadsheet and see scores for the easy trials only.
