Hello

Sorry for the weeklong break, I have been extremely busy. So, let’s do a breakdown of the past week.

Reseach

We have been making good progress in the research.

VR and Muse

Lydia and Harrison have been working on this part more me, and they have been doing a marvelous job. Lydia has figured out the LSL stuff and has gotten event markers sent from the Unity Environment to the Muse Data. I helped then with getting the markers to have specific labels, and we’ll see if that will actually show up on Matlab.

Harrison has been working on the timing signal, so we can get the screens to switch and the triggers to happen at a specific time. To do this, Harrison has a sphere going in a circle and it passes through two cubes. When the cube enters and exits there is a trigger event in the Unity Stream.

They have also been working on the Unity Environment and getting the user’s input. I don’t know what they have been exactly doing, but I think it will be pretty cool.

I’ll start helping with getting the Trivia Paradigm into the Unity environment soon.

PsychoPy and EEG

So, the trigger was working in our last test, but like a moody teenager, it has had a mood swing and hates me again. During our first pilot collection last week the trigger decided to not work again. It was really disheartening to see the PsychoPy application work, and then fail because of the trigger code wasn’t working. Then yesterday, I went into Forker at noon to work on the trigger. I got it working when the trigger was the only think plugged in. After that we had another pilot collection period, and everything seemed to be working. The trigger got mad at us and decided to stop working. I tried running the trigger test and that also didn’t work. We are thinking that maybe having other things hooked up to the computer is causing it to not work.

Matlab

I have also been working on understanding the Matlab code. Currently we are using EEG Lab and a GitHub folder that preprocesses the data. I have figured out how to read different files in Matlab and convert them into the EEG structure needed to run some of the other functions. We have been able to see a heat map and a line plot of the channels.

Life and Activities

While there has been a lot going on in our research, I am doing other things.

Mini Golf

On Saturday we went to play mini golf. It was a lot of fun since we got to hang out while competing with each other. At one point, I was doing pretty well and was in the lead, well at least in the curiosity group. But in the end, I kind of went downhill and lost my lead to Harrison (who ended up winning), but I still got second (which I wasn’t expecting). Following that we played in the arcade at the same place. I won like 100 tickets from 14 dollars and got myself some candy. We then went to a Mexican food spot. I got carnitas and really enjoyed them.

Cooking

I have been doing a lot of cooking which is extremely fun. I finally branched out from my normal easy meals to make and made some chicken legs in the oven. They were really good. I used a spice blend I found at Hy-Vee. It wasn’t anything too fancy, but it was extremely fun to do.

Also, on Thursday we had Heliya help us make Baklava. I have never made baklava before and was excited to try it. It turned out really good and it tasted phenonemal.

Well, that’s all folks.

Best,

Sophie