It has unfortunately been a while since I have last blogged so this will have to be a recap of a lot of the work I have been doing during that time. I want to first start out with our assignment for HCI:
We were tasked to think about our multidisciplinary backgrounds and find a research question that encompasses three areas of study. I study economics and computer science at school, and I am trilingual, meaning I have to love language. I will therefore add linguistics to my background as I done a bit of linguistics in the past. These disciplines, especially linguistics, seem difficult to combine but I can try. My research question that combines all these disciplines:
How do language limitations in modern technology affect economic behavior?

That simple question was a lot harder to come up with than initially expected. Now however, I should talk a bit about what we have been doing up until these last two weeks. I should start by saying that we have many things due very soon. We have to finish our project presentations by this Friday, we have to submit our project poster by Friday as well, and we have to submit our paper by next Wednesday. All this while trying to finish up our actual experiment. We have been very good so far at dividing up roles for everything we need to get done. Sophie, Lydia, and I have all been trying to combine our skills and focus on different aspects of our final VR unity environment classroom. I have been working on a trigger that would allow us to sync the Muse brain stream with events in the classroom, Lydia has been working on interactions in the classroom and getting their level of curiosity for each question onto an excel file output, and Sophie has been working on getting the questions to pop up in VR. Combining all of this will allow for our project to be complete. If we can successfully look at a person’s brainwaves in a virtual environment, doors to many other uses open up. I am very surprised that people have not done this before, but we could be overlooking something. So far though, it seems as though we can put what we have been working on in the lab, onto Unity and get someone hooked up to the classroom environment.
With all this work, we have been doing many pilot tests in the lab. We have been running the whole trivia paradigm with participants are hooked up to the 64-electrode EEG cap. These studies each can take between 1-2 hours plus cleanup which is almost our whole afternoon. We are hoping to get usable data before the end of the week for both our poster and our presentation, but for that, we will have to cram. Because I finished working on the trigger before Lydia and Sophie finish in the environment, I have been starting most of the poster work, working a bit on the paper, and finishing the presentation. I am a bit envious of them coding while I write but I know that I need to improve on my writing more than my coding skills, so I am okay with it. Plus, I got to code the trigger which was something I have never done before. Academic writing, however, is harder than I expected. Especially the methods section, which everyone said would be the easiest because you just write exactly what you did. However, it is hard to break up what we did into something that makes sense and it is difficult to include every detail. I prefer more creative writing like the discussion or even the results. I guess the only way to improve on skills is to step out of my comfort zone, but no one said I had to enjoy it. I guess I am just blogging in the morning to push back the inevitable writing. I hope I can lock in and write well so that when the rest of my group sees it, they feel a lot less stressed about everything that is due and can focus more on the actual experiment. I am almost done writing this blog, but I want to add that Aron has been an amazing mentor along the way. He has been supportive and amazing at providing feedback with everything we do. Even the things that do not directly benefit his project, he takes time to make sure we do it well. I could not have asked for a better mentor, and I have very much enjoyed this project and found a new slight interest in neuroscience. Below is a picture of our VR classroom for context.