Vallacher and Novak's Mouse Program

Question

I am a graduate student looking for a mouse program similar to that of Vallacher and Novak's (1997) to use for my dissertation.
Fischer & Krehbiel (2001) mentioned that they used Labview's software for this. From their paper, it says:
"The circumplex was incorporated into a LabVIEW virtual instrument (National Instruments, Austin, TX). The instrument superimposed a little red X on an image of the circumplex, and the X could be positioned by means of the mouse pointer. The instrument recorded the position of the X once per second. The point where the lines crossed on the circumplex was a neutral point—the position of the X at this point indicated that one was emotionally indifferent to the music. The closer the student moved the X toward a particular word, the more purely that word expressed the student’s feeling. Thus, if a particular moment in the music made the student feel calm, he or she moved the X toward that word. If the music began to make the student feel more tense, then he or she would move the X away from “calm” and toward “tense,” and so on. If a feeling was best expressed by a mixture of the meaning of two words the X could be positioned at an intermediate location that indicated that fact. The instrument actually recorded the coordinates of the X's position on the two dimensions, pleasantness and activation, of the emotion circumplex."
Apparently, this is software that was developed in LabVIEW by a third party. Any help or advice anyone could offer in this area would be greatly appreciated. Thank you! Sally

Answer 1

Kind of hard to say for sure without at least seeing a screenshot or two, but if I had to guess, I'd say they probably had an image of the circumplex on the front panel, and perhaps set the mouse cursor to a big red X (which can be done using the Set Cursor VI), and then just tracked the mouse location, which can be easily done using pane events. There is an example that ships with LabVIEW on how to use Set Cursor, and examples on the event structure. Attached is a simple example just for demonstration.
Attachments:
mouse track.vi ‏14 KB