Running a trial A single trial is sufficient to illustrate some of the complex nonlinear behaviour of the model. The default trial type associated with the IA model is a brief masked presentation of a letter string – these are the sorts of trials that McClelland and Rumelhart focussed on in their 1981 and 1982 papers.

As you can see in the control bar at the top of the screen, to run this type of trial you need to specify:

1. the stimulus
2. the stimulus duration, and
3. the mask duration.

The latter two arguments have default values of 15 and 25 cycles, so to run our first trial it’s sufficient to enter a letter string in the box labelled stimulus.

Let's use the same example as McClelland and Rumelhart : the letter string mave.

When you type this in you should see the triangle icon

on the right of the control bar turn to green to indicate that all the necessary fields have been entered. You are ready to run a trial. But before doing that, let's specify the output that we'd like to see from this trial.

Next: Specifying the output