responseType

Experiments Surveys & forms In surveys it picks the question widget (radio, likert, dropdown...); on experiment trials it activates a different widget set (labels, mic, clicks, box, slider, sort).

Selects a non-default response widget or interaction for a trial. Use it when a keypress or a button is not the response you want: a slider, input boxes, clicks on the stimuli, a sortable list, a microphone recording, or any of the survey question types on form trials.

It is used in two distinct ways:

1. Test/practice (non-form) trials: the value chooses the response widget presented with the stimuli.
2. Form trials (type = form): the value chooses the survey question type.

Left blank (and with no keyboard or button1), the trial falls back to the default: click-to-respond if it has multiple stimuli, otherwise an input box. Word trials with several stimuli and no keyboard, button or responseType are also presented and styled as click trials.

If no responseType widget fits the interaction (drag-and-drop, games, free drawing, multi-step in-trial logic, external web apps), the escape hatch is a custom HTML trial: stimFormat: html plus an uploaded HTML app that saves via parent.testableSDK.saveHtmlTrialResponse. See the “Custom HTML trials” section on the stimFormat page for the full in-app API and its trade-offs.

Syntax

Put one value in the cell, spelled exactly as in the tables below, for example slider.

One extension form exists: box*N (for example box*3) gives N input boxes on the same trial.

Options

Values accepted on test/practice trials (matched exactly, case-sensitive):

Value	Effect
left blank	Default responses (clicks for multi-stim, input box otherwise)
label	Drag response labels onto stimuli
mic	Microphone recording
clicks	Click on stimuli to respond
box	Single text input box
box*N	N text input boxes
comment	Multi-line textarea
drag	Stimuli become draggable; positions recorded
slider	Slider response
sort	Sortable-list response; available on image-stimulus trials only

Values accepted on form trials:

Value	Question shown
box	text input
checkboxes	checkbox (matrix with responseRows)
likert	rating buttons sized to number of responseOptions
dropdown	dropdown
stars	5-star rating
rank	ranking
radio	radio buttons (matrix with responseRows)
slider	slider
comment	textarea
anything else (including a blank cell and date)	display-only text, no input

Defaults & missing values

With no responseType column, or with the cell left blank, a test or practice trial uses the default response mode (clicks when it has several stimuli, otherwise an input box), and a form trial shows display-only text with nothing to answer.

Values are never lowercased for you: Slider or Box match nothing, and silently give you no response widget on a test trial and a display-only element on a form trial.

Works with

• keyboard: on test trials keyboard responses are disabled when responseType is slider, box or comment; the other types can be combined with keyboard responses.
• button1-6: buttons can coexist; with responseType = clicks plus buttons, the participant selects a stimulus by clicking and confirms with a button press.
• responseOptions: read differently for each response type, with dedicated settings for clicks and mic; for box/comment it also carries widget attributes such as size, placeholder, maxLength and enter.
• required: see the required page. On test trials any value there hides the automatic “Next” button for slider until the slider is touched, forces every box/box*N input to be filled in before submitting, and carries the labels:N;stim:N grammar for label. It has no effect on drag, where the save button is controlled by the min/max multiple-response settings in responseOptions instead.
• responseRows: on form trials turns checkboxes/radio into a matrix and wraps other types in a per-row panel.
• When a response window times out, whatever the participant had already entered is saved as a partial response, in the form that fits the response type. On mic trials the recording is finished first and the partial response is saved with it.
• mic used anywhere in the responseType column turns on microphone setup for the whole experiment, and a skip timer never ends a mic trial on its own. While a recording is live, a key or button press does not end the trial immediately: the recording is finished first and the trial is then completed with that press as the response.
• Word trials with more than one stimulus and no keyboard, button1 or responseType are treated as clicks; long-word stimuli only get click styling when responseType is clicks.
• sort also moves the buttons below the sortable list.

Examples

Test trial with three input boxes whose values are saved semicolon-joined:

type	stimFormat	stim1	responseType	responsePos
test	.jpg	face	box*3	below

Form trial with a likert question:

type	head	responseType	responseOptions	required
form	How satisfied are you?	likert	Not at all;Somewhat;Very	1

Test trial with a slider that must be touched before advancing:

type	stimFormat	stim1	responseType	responseOptions	required
test	.png	image1	slider	min:0;max:100	1

Tips & gotchas

Caution

Values are matched exactly and are case-sensitive. A misspelling or the wrong capitalization fails silently: the trial simply shows no response widget, with no warning.

• box*N is the only value that accepts the *N extension.
• date is not available. On a form trial it renders as display-only text, like any unrecognized value.
• sort only works on trials with image stimuli, because the sortable list is built from the stimuli themselves.

Common combinations

responseType appears in these worked recipes:

• Label choice task: Let participants assign on-screen text labels to images by drag and drop, requiring a minimum amount of labelling before they can continue.
• Likert block in random order: Present a block of likert questions in a fresh random order per participant, with the answer options in a fixed order.
• Slider rating trial: Rate each stimulus on a configurable slider scale inside an experiment trial.
• Type the answer: Collect a free-typed answer in an input box on a test trial and score it against the expected text.
• Voice-recorded picture naming: Collect spoken picture-naming responses, saving an audio recording and the voice onset for every trial.