DrawText failures

1

Mac Mini

Ubuntu 14.04

MATLAB 2013a

PTB 3.0.12


I've recently started having issues with Screen('DrawText') which I never had before.


-Background color for text is wrong

-Fails to draw some text altogether

-Text appears compressed and jumbled


I don't get any errors, and the script runs just fine otherwise.


I’ve had subjects where this doesn’t happen at all. For those who did have a problem it happened partway through the 2nd block for one and partway through the 8th block for the other. Restarting the experiment fixed it in the later case, but not the former.


FYI I'm also collecting eye-tracker data and writing it to a data structure on each trial...


Oddly, my stimuli, an RSVP of letters and numbers which uses DrawText is totally unaffected. It’s my response screens where I’m GetMouse'ing or KbCheck’ing in a while loop where the problem is (see attached).


Thanks!

Mary MacLean

UCSB




2
<fqgpx7e4wkafuds2dwcp7vxg5dz5quwhlp6ci3n3@...> wrote :

Mac Mini

Ubuntu 14.04

MATLAB 2013a

PTB 3.0.12


-> What model of MacMini/hardware specs/graphics card? What's the Matlab output of PTB? How old is that PTB release?


I've recently started having issues with Screen('DrawText') which I never had before.


-Background color for text is wrong

-Fails to draw some text altogether

-Text appears compressed and jumbled


I don't get any errors, and the script runs just fine otherwise.


I’ve had subjects where this doesn’t happen at all. For those who did have a problem it happened partway through the 2nd block for one and partway through the 8th block for the other. Restarting the experiment fixed it in the later case, but not the former.


-> Sounds like some out-of-memory issue to me.


FYI I'm also collecting eye-tracker data and writing it to a data structure on each trial...


-> Does it happen without collecting the eye tracker data?

-> Do you have some sample code that demonstrates the problem?


-mario


Oddly, my stimuli, an RSVP of letters and numbers which uses DrawText is totally unaffected. It’s my response screens where I’m GetMouse'ing or KbCheck’ing in a while loop where the problem is (see attached).


Thanks!

Mary MacLean

UCSB




3
Mary,

you need to provide a _minimal_ self contained sample script that demonstrates the problem. Something that fails on your side and that i could easily run on a machine here to see. Ideally something that runs automatically without user interaction. You just posted some sub-function of your code. That function is unlikely to cause a problem and obviously not something i could run to test it. If there is a bug in your code it is probably in some other part of it, and if it isn't a bug in your code then you need to make it easy for me to reproduce the problem.

Also provide PTB's full output in the Matlab console during such a run where things go wrong.
-mario



---In PSYCHTOOLBOX@yahoogroups.com, <fqgpx7e4wkafuds2dwcp7vxg5dz5quwhlp6ci3n3@...> wrote :

3.8 GiB RAM
2.5 GHz x4
Intel graphics card

Matlab output: 3.0.12 - Flavor: Debian package - psychtoolbox-3 (3.0.12.20160514.dfsg1-1~nd14.04+1)

Haven't tested w/o eyetracker, but hasn't been an issue with other eye tracking experiments on same machine/same matlab/same ptb/etc.


Thanks,
Mary