title

Experiments

title sets heading text shown at the top of the screen. It appears in exactly two situations:

1. Instructions trials, above the page text.
2. Feedback screens, above the feedback text.

It is an older sibling of the head column. On both screens head is displayed after title and therefore overwrites it whenever head is filled in. Prefer head in new trial files; use title only when maintaining old files that already use it.

Syntax

Type the heading text straight into the cell.

HTML is allowed, so you can wrap the heading in tags to control its size or colour.

On instructions trials you can also use %variable% placeholders and they are filled in before the screen is shown: recorded responses (%response%, %rt%, %correct%, %responseCode%), indexed and aggregate forms such as %rt.avg% and %correct.perc%, participant details such as %id%, and your own variables. Relative indexed lookups are shifted by one, because the trial showing the heading has not recorded a response yet.

Caution

On feedback screens the cell is shown exactly as typed. Placeholders are not filled in there and appear literally as %rt% and so on.

Options

Value	Behavior
empty cell	Nothing displayed
any other value	Rendered as HTML in the heading area at the top of the screen

Nothing else in the cell is given a special meaning.

Defaults & missing values

If the column is absent, or the cell is left empty, no heading is shown on that screen.

The column header is matched case-insensitively and surrounding spaces are ignored, so Title and TITLE map to this column as well.

Works with

• head: fills the same heading area immediately after title, on both instructions and feedback screens, so a filled-in head always wins.
• type and stimFormat: the heading only shows on instructions trials and feedback screens. type set to form never shows it, and a row using a stimulus list must have type set to instructions to count as an instructions screen.
• content: the page text below the heading. On mobile, when that text is too long for the screen, the layout differs depending on whether a heading is present.
• The heading is cleared between trials, so it never carries over to the next screen on its own.
• Results: like every recognized column present in the trial file, the per-trial value is echoed into the results file.

Examples

type	title	content	button1
instructions	Welcome	Press the button below to begin.	Start

type	title	content
instructions	<h2>Block complete</h2>	Your average response time was %rt.avg% ms.

type	stimFormat	stim1	key	feedback	title
test	.jpg	face01	a	Correct!	Feedback

Real trial files most often use title as a short heading, frequently wrapping it in HTML to control color (this is the single most common pattern in real files apart from plain headings and placeholders, and it demonstrates the HTML behavior more directly than the constructed rows above):

type	title	content
instructions	<font color="white">TAS-20</font>	Content for instructions

Tips & gotchas

• title is not a general trial heading: it has no effect on image, word, audio, video, survey or form trials. Only instructions trials and feedback screens display it.
• A heading already on screen is simply replaced by the new value, never appended to.
• The heading area is also used by built-in screens (calibration, frame rate recording, general messages, microphone upload), so text appearing there does not always come from this column.

Caution

If you fill in both title and head on the same row, only head stays visible.

Common combinations

title appears in these worked recipes:

• End-of-block summary: Show participants their accuracy and average response time on a summary screen after a block of scored trials.
• Practice, then test: Walk participants through instructions and a feedback practice block before the scored test block.
• Counterbalanced key mapping: Give half the participants one response-key mapping and half the reversed mapping, with matching instructions for each.
• Pick a subset of blocks: Give each participant a random two of three self-contained tasks, each opening with its own instructions screen.