Mildly Irritated Birds - User Documentation Ver 0.1b

Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Starting The Game
  • 2.1 Arguments
• 3. Running The Game
• 4. The .ini File
• 5. The Schema XML File
• 6. The Word File

1. Introduction

Mildly Irritated Birds is an experimental game based on the research of C. Macleod, A. Matthews and P. Tata given in the paper 'Attentional Bias in Emotional Disorders'. A focal point appears briefly on the screen and then two words appear for a similarly brief period. A probe then appears in the same location as one of the two words, and the participant must indicate which of two possible probe types has appeared. After selection control over a capture device is given to the participant who has a limited time in which to capture an escaping bird.

2. Starting The Game

The game is in a Java ARchive (JAR) file and can be run directly (in most operating systems) by double clicking it. Alternately it can be run from the attached .bat (Windows) or .sh (Unix/Mac) files, again by double clicking. The third and final way is to run it directly from the command line by typing:

2.1 Arguments

The ini file used by the game to define the timings and the schema used to specify the trial can be pre-loaded as arguments to the game.

Without these arguments the program looks for a default.ini file and a default-schema.xml file in the current directory, if it finds them it will use these by default.

3. Running The Game

Once started the game will load its required assets and present the user with a menu screen with the options:

• Play Game
• Play Demo
• Settings

Clicking on Play Game starts the trial according to the given schema, it will not start if no schema has been provided. The game will finish when all trial sequences have been exhausted, the game can be exited at any point by pressing the [ESC] key but the results will only be recorded if this is done at he end of a trial seequence or at the end of the game.

Clicking on Play Demo starts a never-ending run through of the process with some test words, no schema is required to run this. The demo can be exited at any time by pressing the [ESC] key and will never record any of the data

The settings has options to change the trial schema being used, provide a participant identifier, change the timings and the location and timestamp for the trial results.

3. The .ini File

The .ini file allows the user to specify the timings (in milliseconds) and the output settings for the trials. It takes the form of the example given below:

The // at the start of a line inidicates a comment, using this prevents anything else on the line from being read. The keys correspond to:

• time.centering = The length of time that the bird sits mid-screen to centre the vision.
• time.worddisplay = The length of time for which the words are displayed.
• time.capture = The length of time that the participant has to capture the bird.
• time.scoredisplay = The length of time that the score is visible after the bird capture part.
• test.outputfolder = The folder to put the finished trial.
• test.dateformat = The format of the timestamp to put on the finished trial.

Letter	Date or Time Component	Examples
G	Era designator	AD
y	Year	1996; 96
M	Month in year	July; Jul; 07
w	Week in year	27
W	Week in month	2
D	Day in year	189
d	Day in month	10
F	Day of week in month	2
E	Day in week	Tuesday; Tue
a	Am/pm marker	PM
H	Hour in day (0-23)	0
k	Hour in day (1-24)	24
K	Hour in am/pm (0-11)	0
h	Hour in am/pm (1-12)	12
m	Minute in hour	30
s	Second in minute	55
S	Millisecond	978
z	Time zone	Pacific Standard Time; PST; GMT-08:00
Z	Time zone	-0800

5. The Schema XML File

The schema file describes how the trial will be run, it is an xml document and it must be specified for the game to be run.

Each trial has a name which is then used to name its output folder. The random attribute is to specify different forms of randomising the trial, currently only pseudo is supported but sobol will be added shortly. The seed is the number used to initialise the randomisation, a test can be re-run using the same seed. If this attribute is not given then the game uses the current time in milliseconds as its seed.

Each trial is split into sequences (so pauses can be given to the participant). Each sequence can be of type emotional/neutral inidicating that the emotional/neutral word is always selected for the probe to appear in the same location. A third type of unbiased also exists for which the word is randomly selected. Sequences have a specified length and also what proportion of that is made up of tests (as opposed to training phases). The file from which the words come must be indicated and there is the option to choose which subset of words is used for the training phases. Without this element the subset training subset is randomly selected.

6. The Word File

The word file is a text file with two sets of pairs of words. The pairs are joined by a hyphen and the sets are split by a space, e.g.