Week 5 (July 3-7)

Overview

Fourth of July was this week, so I did not come to the lab until Wednesday. For the days I was in the lab, I contributed some to the ITS project as a whole with literature reviews and to my personal project by running a pilot study and solving issues thus discovered.

Wednesday

This day I reviewed some literature concerning mental tasks in the same vein as the n-back task; that is, they are abstractions intended to isolate specific activities. The papers can be found here and here.

Afterward, I attended the weekly ITS meeting, where we discuss everything going on in the overarching ITS area.

Thursday

This day I attempted a pilot study for my project with a grad supervisor and a colleague in the lab. The colleague was to act as any participant would as I practiced going through the experimental procedure. We encountered multiple troubles:

  • Some steps for setting up the experiment were missing.
  • None of the sound files played.
  • The data stream was being "actively rejected by target address", according to the recurrent error.
  • A change to the flags sent to our DAQ software was not actually implemented.
  • So we only went so far into the experiment and did not perform the entire study. My grad supervisor gave me some notes on running a study with human subjects. I edited in the missing steps in the procedure and as far as I could tell I fixed the flag issues, but I could not verify because of the sound issue.

    Afterward, I had trouble with the sound issue. When I opened Unity to try to see what the trouble was with the sound. The project opened with forty-three (43) errors concerning something called 'FMOD' and it not able to load sound files. I sent a bug report to Unity and restarted the computer to see if that would solve the problem. It did not, and this time the program froze when I went to close out of it and crashed. I sent another bug report. I reinstalled Unity, updating to the new version, and tried again. This time it had forty-four (44) errors and again froze and crashed when I went to close out. I sent another bug report.

    Friday

    This day I attended the lab-wide weekly "what did you do this week?" meeting. I presented on the literature I reviewed and the pilot study I attempted the previous day, including the troubles I ran into. I received possible routes of solving the audio issues from my colleagues and supervisors.