After two and a half weeks of confusion and frustration, the title of this blog post is the text I sent to some of my friends on Wednesday, May 25. It was a truly glorious day. As I wrote at the end of my last blog post, I fixed the main problem in my script. Basically, the problem had been that I was trying to make things more complex than they needed to be and there was no simple way to code it that way in Presentation. Once I was in a clearer state of mind I was able to look at my script and hunt through the many error messages to figure out where the original problem was. After changing the variable that was being indexed and fixing the way the script counted trials, I had a working script for each of my tasks!
On Wednesday morning last week, I got to the lab at 8:45 and started trying to program Presentation to send triggers and record button presses myself. By the time Pascal got there at 9:15, I had it almost completely figured out. He explained the final issues I was having, and then it all made sense to me and I was able to program the button box for the second script all by myself. The one problem I did have was that the amplifiers didn’t seem to be set up right for me to record eye movements. Since Wednesday was only the pilot, I decided to go without eye measurements and figure it out later.
Natalia came to help me cap Amy, and everything went well! Then I had about an hour to sit there while she did my two tasks and marvel at the fact that it had actually happened. Both of my scripts ran all the way through without crashing, sent triggers at the right times, and recorded button presses. If you had asked me a month ago, two weeks ago, or even a few days ago, I would have said it would never happen. But it did!
Then on Friday the 27th, it was time for me to start running real participants. After nine straight hours in the lab, I had three of my 20-25 participants and was feeling far more competent and independent with my work. Friday was a long day, but it was worth it.
On the 20th, I was standing in a room feeling vastly unprepared. On the 27th, I was back in my groove. It may have been a different protocol, environment, and program than what I was used to, but it was the same process. I came a long way in that one week, and I truly couldn’t be prouder.
So often I think that if things aren’t working out, I just have to keep working until the problem is fixed. I pride myself on being observational, but when I’m caught in the middle of my own project sometimes I forget to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. I tend not to give myself a break until the project is done…but the progress I made in that week taught me that sometimes a break and a step back is exactly what’s necessary. When nothing was working during my first pilot session I calmly packed up and left, instead of staying and getting increasingly frustrated. When I was trying to adjust to the new EEG protocol I started to separate the individual steps into general phases and then remember how to make each phase happen instead of memorizing a long list of steps and risking missing one of them.
I don’t want to be stressed out the entire time I am here. I want to spend my time improving my independence, skills, and experience as a researcher, but I also want to enjoy my first trip outside of the United States. I am hoping that the lessons I learned in the journey to creating a working experiment will help me to do just that.