stimList

Experiments Surveys & forms On form rows the listed images display next to the question; they are not clickable response options there.

stimList is an inline, semicolon-separated list of stimuli for a single trial. It is a compact alternative to filling stim1, stim2… stimN: one cell supplies all of the trial’s stimuli. It does NOT reference named stimulus lists (that is stimFormat: list + the stim column) and it does not trigger dynamic-list expansion (that is the #listName# marker syntax).

Syntax

Write the trial’s stimuli in one cell, separated by semicolons, in the order they should be used: face1;face2;face3. Semicolon is the only separator.

On image, audio and video trials each item is a filename without its extension; stimFormat supplies the extension when the stimulus is shown or preloaded.

On stimFormat: word trials each item is the text shown on screen, and may contain %variable% placeholders.

Do not put spaces around the semicolons. Only the cell as a whole is trimmed, so a space after a semicolon becomes part of the next item.

Options

Value	Meaning
empty (or column absent)	No inline list; falls back to the stim column, then to stim1..stimN
a;b;c	Trial has stimuli a, b, c mapped to stimulus slots 1..n in order

There are no keywords or option tokens; every ;-separated token is a stimulus.

Defaults & missing values

Leave the cell empty, or leave the column out, and the trial takes its stimuli from the stim column instead. If that is empty too, the per-slot stimN columns are used.

How many stimuli a trial gets: normally the highest numbered stimN column you filled in, raised to the list length when stimList is longer than that. On stimFormat: list rows the picked list row (stim_actual) overrides both.

Works with

• stim is the exact fallback for stimList: it does the same job, and if both cells have a value, stimList wins.
• stimFormat decides whether the items are images, audio, video or words, and supplies the file extension appended to each item on media trials. The extension is not added when the item already ends with it.
• target and mask are never taken from stimList; they are always read from their own columns.
• Having a stimList (or stim) column in the file widens how many numbered stimN, sortN and buttonN slots are available, up to the longest list, with a minimum of 12. Only rows whose stimFormat is a media extension count towards that (see Tips & gotchas).
• On stimFormat: list rows the stimuli picked from the list (stim_actual) take over from stimList.
• Presentation and timing columns (presTime, ISI, stimOptions…) treat the resulting stimuli exactly as if they had come from stimN columns.

Examples

Image trial, three stimuli from one cell (equivalent to stim1=face1, stim2=face2, stim3=face3):

type	stimFormat	stimList	presTime	ISI	keyboard	key
test	.jpg	face1;face2;face3	500	200	f j	f

Word trial, list longer than any stimN columns (the trial gets 4 stimuli):

type	stimFormat	stimList	keyboard	key
test	word	apple;pear;plum;fig	a b	a

Tips & gotchas

• Items keep any spaces you write around the semicolons, so face1; face2 looks for a file whose name starts with a space.
• An item that already carries a DIFFERENT extension than stimFormat gets stimFormat appended anyway: a.png on a stimFormat: .jpg trial becomes a.png.jpg. Only an exact match of the same extension is left alone.
• A word trial’s long stimList never widens the numbered column slots past the minimum of 12, because only rows with a media extension in stimFormat are counted. The trial itself still shows every item in the list.

Caution

When a file has several stimList rows of different lengths, the count of available numbered slots can come out short: a later, shorter list can displace an earlier, longer one. If a trial needs many stimuli, put the longest stimList row last, or add explicit stimN columns to the file.