The burgeoning field of third language (L3) acquisition has increasingly focused on intermediate stages of language development, aiming to establish the groundwork for comprehensive models of L3 learning that encompass the entire developmental …
Reducing the impedance in electroencephalography (EEG) is crucial for capturing high-quality brain activity signals. This process involves ensuring that electrodes make optimal contact with the skin without harming the participant. Below are a few tips to achieve this using a blunt needle, electrolyte gel and gentle wiggling.
To err is human, but when it comes to creating research materials, mistakes can be reduced by sharing more of our work and by using some helpful tools. For instance, we can make our research materials FAIRer—that is, more Findable, Accessible, …
Say, you need to set up a makeshift EEG lab in an office? Easy-peasy---only, try to move the hardware as little as possible, especially laptops with dongles sticking out. The rest is a trail of snapshots devoid of captions, a sink, a shower room and other paraphernalia, as this is only an ancillary, temporary, extraordinary little lab, and all those staples are within reach in our mainstream lab (see Ledwidge et al., 2018; Luck, 2014).
Electroencephalography (EEG) has become a cornerstone for understanding the intricate workings of the human brain in the field of neuroscience. However, EEG software and hardware come with their own set of constraints, particularly in the management of markers, also known as triggers. This article aims to shed light on these limitations and future prospects of marker management in EEG studies, while also introducing R functions that can help deal with vmrk files from BrainVision.
Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals are often contaminated by muscle artifacts such as blinks, jaw clenching and (of course) yawns, which generate electrical activity that can obscure the brain signals of interest. These artifacts typically manifest as large, abrupt changes in the EEG signal, complicating data interpretation and analysis. To mitigate these issues, participants can be instructed during the preparatory phase of the session to minimize blinking and to keep their facial muscles relaxed. Additionally, researchers can emphasize the importance of staying still and provide practice sessions to help participants become aware of their movements, thereby reducing the likelihood of muscle artifacts affecting the EEG recordings.
I would like to ask for advice regarding a custom plugin for a serial reaction time task, that was created by @vekteo, and is available in Gorilla, where the code can be edited and tested. By default, trials are self-paced, but I would need them to time out after 2,000 ms. I am struggling to achieve this, and would be very grateful if someone could please advise me a bit.
Longitudinal studies consist of several sessions, and often involve session session conductors. To facilitate the planning, registration and tracking of sessions, a session logbook becomes even more necessary than usual. To this end, an Excel workbook with conditional formatting can help automatise some formats and visualise the progress.
Below is an example that is available on OneDrive. To fully access this workbook, it may be downloaded via File > Save as > Download a copy.
The best argument to motivate a preregistration may be that it doesn’t take any extra time. It just requires frontloading an important portion of the work. As a reward, the paper will receive greater trust from the reviewers and the readers at large. Preregistration is not perfect, but is a lesser evil that reduces the misuse of statistical analysis in science.
Is it worth learning how to use a reference management system such as Zotero? Maybe.
The hours you invest in learning how to use Zotero (approx. 10 hours) are likely to pay off, as they will save you a lot of time that you would otherwise spend formatting, revising and correcting references. In addition, this skill would become part of your skill set.
A great guide
Free, online webinars in which you could participate and ask questions
In the fast-paced world of scientific research, establishing minimum standards for the creation of research materials is essential. Whether it's stimuli, custom software for data collection, or scripts for statistical analysis, the quality and transparency of these materials significantly impact the reproducibility and credibility of research. This blog post explores the importance of adhering to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, and offers practical examples for researchers, with a focus on the cognitive sciences.
The result shows a varying delay of around 2 seconds on average. It would be very helpful for us if we could cut down this delay, as it adds up. To try to achieve this, I reduced the number of variables logged, from the default 363 to 34 important variables. Unfortunately, this change did not result in a reduction of the delay.
The OpenSesame user base is skyrocketing but—of course—remains small in comparison to many other user bases that we are used to. Therefore, when developing an experiment in OpenSesame, there are still many opportunities to break the mould. When you need to do something beyond the standard operating procedure, it may take longer to find suitable resources than it takes when a more widespread tool is used. So, why would you still want to use OpenSesame?
I'm sending the triggers in a binary format because Python requires this. For instance, to send the trigger 1, I run the code serialport.write(b'1'). I have succeeded in sending triggers in this way. However, I encounter two problems. First, the triggers are converted in a way I cannot entirely decipher. For instance, when I run the code serialport.write(b'1'), the trigger displayed in BrainVision Recorder is S 49, not S 1 as I would hope (please see Appendix below). Second, I cannot send two triggers with the same code one after the other. For instance, if I run serialport.write(b'1'), a trigger appears in BrainVision Recorder, but if I run the same afterwards (no matter how many times), no trigger appears. I tried to solve these problems by opening the parallel port in addition to the serial port, but the problems persist.
I’m developing a slightly tricky design in OpenSesame (a Python-based experiment builder). My stimuli comprise two kinds of sentences that contain different elements, and different numbers of elements. These sentences must be presented word by word. Furthermore, I need to attach triggers to some words in the first kind of sentences but not in the second kind. Last, these kinds of sentences must be intermixed within a block (or a sequence) of trials, because the first kind are targets and the second kind are fillers.
I am using jsPsych to create an experiment and I am struggling to sample from two variables simultaneously. Specifically, in each trial, I would like to present a primeWord and a targetWord by randomly sampling each of them from its own variable.
I have looked into several resources—such as sampling without replacement, custom sampling and position indices—but to no avail. I’m a beginner at this, so it’s possible that one of these resources was relevant (especially the last one, I think).
OpenSesame offers options to counterbalance properties of the stimulus across participants. However, in cases of more involved assignments of session parameters across participants, it becomes necessary to write a bit of Python code in an inline script, which should be placed at the top of the timeline. In such a script, the participant-specific parameters are loaded in from a csv file. Below is a minimal example of the csv file.
In the preparation of projects, files are often downloaded from OSF. It is good to document the URL addresses that were used for the downloads. These URLs can be provided in a code script (see example) or in a README file. Better yet, it’s possible to specify the version of each file in the URL. This specification helps reduce the possibility of inaccuracies later, should any files be modified afterwards.
The need for covariates—or nuisance variables—in statistical analyses is twofold. The first reason is purely statistical and the second reason is academic.
First, the use of covariates is often necessary when the variable(s) of interest in a study may be connected to, and affected by, some satellite variables (Bottini et al., 2022; Elze et al., 2017; Sassenhagen & Alday, 2016). This complex scenario is the most common one due to the multivariate, dynamic, interactive nature of the real world.
Research has suggested that conceptual processing depends on both language-based and vision-based information. We tested this interplay at three levels of the experimental structure: individuals, words and tasks. To this end, we drew on three …
Research has suggested that conceptual processing depends on both language-based and sensorimotor information. In this thesis, I investigate the nature of these systems and their interplay at three levels of the experimental structure---namely, …
The powercurve function from the R package ‘simr’ (Green & MacLeod, 2016) can incur very long running times when the method used for the calculation of p values is Kenward-Roger or Satterthwaite (see Luke, 2017). Here I suggest three ways for cutting down this time.
Where possible, use a high-performance (or high-end) computing cluster. This removes the need to use personal computers for these long jobs.
In case you’re using the fixed() parameter of the powercurve function, and calculating the power for different effects, run these at the same time (‘in parallel’) on different machines, rather than one after another.
Liu et al. (2018) present a study that implements the conceptual modality switch (CMS) paradigm, which has been used to investigate the modality-specific nature of conceptual representations (Pecher et al., 2003). Liu et al.‘s experiment uses event-related potentials (ERPs; similarly, see Bernabeu et al., 2017; Collins et al., 2011; Hald et al., 2011, 2013). In the design of the switch conditions, the experiment implements a corpus analysis to distinguish between purely-embodied modality switches and switches that are more liable to linguistic bootstrapping (also see Bernabeu et al.
In a highly recommendable presentation available on Youtube, Michael Frank walks us through R Markdown. Below, I loosely summarise and partly elaborate on Frank's advice regarding collaboration among colleagues, some of whom may not be used to R Markdown (see relevant time point in Frank's presentation).
The first way is using GitHub, which has a great version control system, and even allows the rendering of Markdown text, if the file is given the extension ‘.
This app presents linguistic data over several tabs. The code combines the great front-end of Flexdashboard—based on R Markdown and yielding an unmatched user interface—, with the great back-end of Shiny—allowing users to download sections of data they select, in various formats. The hardest nuts to crack included modifying the rows/columns orientation without affecting the functionality of tables. A cool, recent finding was the reactable package. A nice feature, allowed by Flexdashboard, was the use of quite different formats in different tabs.
Most of the recordings are perfectly fine, but a few present a big error. Out of 64 original electrodes, only two appear. These are the right mastoid (RM) and the left eye sensor (LEOG). Both are bipolar electrodes. RM is to be re-referenced to the online reference electrode, while LEOG is to be re-referenced to the right eye electrode.