This week I filling a supporting role to the rule-learning task pilot studies, fixing and editing the presentation program as necessary. I also ran a pilot study for the n-back task.
This day I attended the lab-wide "what are we going to do this week" meeting. I received the assignments of having a pilot study or two over the week and to participate in others's pilot studies this week.
Afterward, I was the acting participant in a rule-learning pilot study. I showed my colleagues leading this study how to set up everything and then let them run through their procedure with me as their participant.
This day I made changes to the rule-learning task presenter program, largely small edits to the presentation aspects (including a prompt for the pause feature, typoes, changes in flags sent to our DAQ, etc). This edit-making was done while more pilot studies for the rule-learning task were run.
The IRB has yet to return our application and the lab director is out of the lab this week so I do not anticipate having much to do in regards of my own study. It is the seventh week of my REU and I have yet gotten the chance to produce any usable data; at this moment I have some small doubts I will not be able to bring my project to completion before my time ends.
This day I attended the weekly ITS meeting, where we discuss everything going on in the overarching ITS area. There we discussed little, since our lab director was not present: some on the rule-learning task, some on the mind-wandering task.
Afterward, there was an attempted pilot study of the rule-learning task which fell apart because the script for sending data to our DAQ from the fNIRS device kept crashing its TCP connection. When switched to UDP connection it worked fine, but then the flags sent from the presentation program to the DAQ also had to be changed to a UDP connection. What would be a simple problem to solve, as I and my collleague assisting me thought, but it took two hours to go from "we are definitely going to use a UDP connection for the flags" to actually fully getting the flags to the DAQ because there was a small thing overlooked for a long while. Once found and resolved, everything worked.
This day I tested the program and DAQ to make sure it still worked before two pilot studies for the rule-learning task. I made myself available for the study runners in case something went wrong or needed assistance, but that was not necessary. I had began to feel that project on my end is coming to a close.
This day I ran a pilot study for the n-back task, it being a few weeks since I had done so before. I had felt I did well.
Afterward, I attended the lab-wide weekly "what did you do this week?" meeting. I presented on my filling a supporting role to the rule-learning task pilot studies.