25 May, 2017
Happy Ascension Day! (German federal holiday celebrated 40 days after Easter)
And Happy Father’s Day! (also celebrated in Germany on the same day as Ascension Day)
I’ve already run 13 participants in one of my studies! I’m extremely excited about how smoothly everything is going and how some of the preliminary results are looking! 🙂
My other experiment … is another story. Since this study involves eye-tracking, I knew it would take a little longer to get it up and running — the eye-tracker in this lab is a little different than the one at Penn State, so I’ve had a few practice runs with some of the people in the lab just so that I’m comfortable with the machine and the procedure of the experiment. At this point I’m ready to run participants, and I have two scheduled for next week. Now that I’m done with my first wave of participants in the other study, I can focus all of my efforts on recruiting participants for my eye-tracking study — let’s see how many native English speakers I can find in Braunschweig. My personal goal is 20. (For now.)
I’m also lucky enough to be in Braunschweig at the same time as my advisor, and I get to see first-hand some of the cool things Dr. Jackson and Dr. Hopp are working on. Specifically, I’m working with them on a project using the lab’s eye-tracking glasses, which provide a more versatile way to measure participant’s eye movements (i.e. participants can perform more natural tasks and don’t have to be staring at a computer screen). We’re working on a language game to be played by participants using the glasses. Our first dry-run of the game is next week — we’ll see how it goes!
In addition to all of that going on in the lab, I got a chance to travel last weekend to the city of Bremen. Having never before set foot on this continent, naturally I want to go EVERYWHERE, but I thought Bremen would be a nice daytrip for my first solo adventure in Germany. It was a perfect day to walk around Bremen, take pictures of the Stadtmusikanten (pictured above), explore the city’s Schnoor district (with its narrow “streets” sometimes little wider than shoulder-width), eat ice cream in Germany for the first time, and take a stroll in the Bürgerpark north of the city. Definitely a good first adventure, and I can’t wait to travel in the upcoming weekends! I already have plans to travel to Cologne and Berlin — and maybe Leipzig and Hamburg and maybe more… I love how close everything is compared to the U.S., and the train system (although daunting at first) is extremely convenient for traveling and doing touristy things.
Here’s to more sunny adventures and smooth experiments.
Tschüss,
Neil