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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 stages 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. Each of these phases can happen as quickly as a week, or last as long as a semester.

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). 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.

Note: Each project contains a single _README.txt file. This file contains all instructions and notes related to the project. Familiarize yourself with this document, and document anything that happens with the experiment that isn't already documented, including problems, solutions, changes and updates.

Expectations and Responsibilities

You should always have a fairly clear idea of what is expected of you for a given task. If you don't, do not hesitate to ask for clarification from whoever is overseeing the project. It is their job to make sure this is communicated clearly. Ask yourself:

• What is the letter and spirit of the task? You'll want to know the rules and instructions you're supposed to follow (letter), but a good sense of the important outcome we're going for (spirit) will help you know if/when you should modify the instructions, ask for clarification and generally handle unforeseeen circumstances. Understanding the spirit of the task takes time and experience, but it is also the aspect of task completion that will give you the most growth/experience. By gaining an intuition for the spirit of experimental design, you can think about how to improve a method, or consider alternatives.
• How do I know when I'm done? Some tasks in the design phase need to be just good enough for us to play around with, while others, like data entry need to be double and sometimes triple checked so that there are 0 errors.

Continue to Project Overview to learn about methods for project stages.