As just about anybody who has spoken to me in the past two months knows, my first step in actually being able to test participants here in Nijmegen is recoding my study. While Penn State uses E-Prime for EEG experiments, Radboud uses Presentation, so I had no choice but to 1) figure out the details of how my study is set up to test our other language populations; 2) download and learn the basics of Presentation; and 3) program my study in Presentation. As somebody who has no programming experience whatsoever, this has been quite an interesting task.
On Tuesday of last week, I had a meeting with Pascal de Water, who is a member of the Technical Support Group at Radboud and works on the software (including Presentation). In fact, he teaches Ph.D. students how Presentation works so they have the skillset to program their own studies. Because I did not have any sort of training session, he was willing to talk me through some of the more confusing aspects of the program and begin altering a template to better match the specifics of my tasks.
After that meeting, I felt exponentially more confident in my ability to actually finish programming my study and make this work. Unfortunately, that confidence came and went many times over the course of last week. Every time I thought I figured something out, it would cause another problem and my script would crash yet again. On Wednesday I was feeling confident so I decided to book one of the ERP labs and have my pilot session on Friday. On Friday, things had slipped backwards and I was no longer as prepared as I had expected. The scripts for both of my tasks crashed after the first block, my workspace on the computer for checking impedance levels and recording EEG data wasn’t set up properly, and my triggers weren’t sending. The pilot session felt like a complete flop.
After spending a few minutes staring at everything that wasn’t working, I came up with a plan: I emailed Pascal again asking if we could have another meeting, and then I packed up and decided that it was time for the week to be done. Clearly, I had overestimated my preparedness and the pilot session wasn’t ready to happen yet. I decided to email the participants who had signed up for Wednesday May 25, asking them if we could reschedule because my script had crashed. I will instead use the lab I already have booked for that day to pilot once again. Now that I am have more time to prepare and I have a better understanding of my technical needs, I don’t anticipate having the same problems this week. I left the lab for the week and started working on troubleshooting my scripts yet again in my apartment.
It is frustrating to me that I have been here for two full weeks and still can’t run my experiment. Knowing that I only have six weeks left in Radboud to explore the culture and test my participants is stressful, because there is so much I want to do and such little time to do it. There are so many interesting research talks here and I don’t want to miss out on anything, but right now my first priority is still to get my experiment up and running so that life can go a little more smoothly.
As I write this blog post, I am taking a break after (I think) finally figuring out the problem I had been having with my script last week. The scripts for both of my tasks now appear to run completely to the end without repeating any stimuli, which (as long as my solution actually works) is an incredible improvement. Next step: sending triggers and making sure the workspace is configured properly. Right now I feel confident that with some help, it will indeed get done.
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