Home

This is an overview meant to provide context and guidance for working in the Language and Cognitive Neuroscience lab, tailored to the projects I'm currently running. The goal is to familiarize you with the purpose, methods, and expectations for tasks. You may work on one or more projects, by yourself or with other Research Assistants, graduate students or PIs (Maryellen MacDonald; Mark Seidenberg).

Project

A project is defined broadly by a research question, and will contain a series of experiments that often share the same method. Each experiment will go through a process of design, experimenting, analyzing, and reporting results. The amount and nature of work at each stage depends largely on how similar the study is from something that's been done before, either in or outside this lab.

Folder access

The structure of a project folder reflects the general flow of stages and experiments. Each experiment is a separate folder, containing folders for each stage (design, experiment, analysis). Since presentations, whether reporting a subset or all of the results, speak to the broader research question, they are consolidated in a single folder outside the individual experiments. Your access to folders will be at the broadest level relevant to the task at hand. So, if I ask you to help me design experiment 4 in a project called "Word Choice", I'll share the design folder inside the experiment 4 folder, with you.

How to use the folder

Each project contains a single _README.txt file. This file contains all instructions and notes related to the project.

Research Method

This section describes the application of research methods as it pertains to current and anticipated projects. If you have experience with research methods, whether coursework or other lab experience, or if you have none, I encourage you to read closely and generate questions. Even the process of running quality experiments is a process, and your feedback is helpful in understanding why something works, or how it could work better.

Design experiment

At it's basic level, an experiment is the translation of a research question into the relationship between some manipulation, and observable behavior. At the design stage we want to come up with a clear, meaningful manipulation, and a clear, meaningful measurement. This phase is informed by prior research, similar studies, and exploration.

Historically, my studies realize these aspects of design in predictable ways, that will save all of us the task of reinventing the wheel.

Example generic design: *Research question: Does the color of an object influence the order of the object's mention in a sentence? *Manipulation: Differently colored objects. *Observable behavior: The order of mention in sentences people say when asked to describe the object.

• Stimuli are controlled for visual features (all made the same), normed if necessary.
  • Something better than pixton
  • Python scripts
• IV and controls: Counterbalance made; experimental versions made.
  • Python scripts or excel
• Experiment design
  • Eprime or python
  • DV and controls: measures in place and tested.

Set up, run experiment

• Updated counterbalance version administered identically to all participants.
  • Log and report all runtime data, errors, participant log, daily.
  • Input all 100% unambiguous data points (e.g. e-prime; debrief questions)
  • Operationalize data entry for subjective (e.g. named responses).
  • Report on experiment log on box.com

Code data

• Coding criteria defined.
• Coders trained
• Subset coded for intercoder reliability.

Process data

• Read/clean r code
• R summary statistics

Report results

• Make/modify figures in R.
• Set up/modify poster templates.