Weeks 4 & 5

Weeks 4 & 5: Research

When I got to the lab on Monday, I started thinking about what I was going to work on for the rest of the summer. I really liked all the programming stuff I was doing, but I wanted to also do some research, and not just work on the results of Spiro's work. So I decided I wanted to run my own study, the problem was, I had no idea what I wanted to study! My timing plan for the week was to do general research for a few days and find a topic by Tuesday or Wednesday, and then have a project plan by Friday. I went through a RIDICULOUS amount of study ideas; everything from using music and American Sign Language to help autistic children to communicate, to researching handedness, to researching the effects of amount of music on advertising. By tuesday (surprisingly) I decided I was going to research the effect of musical emotion (the perceived emotion of a given piece) on decision making. (Quick side note: my ideal research project was to have something that I could do a behavioral study on this summer and look at other results in the lab so that I could go up to school in september, present my results to a lab, and then do the imaging part of the study at UR. This idea fit all those criteria.) The advertising idea was the precursor to the decision making idea. For the rest of the week, I worked on study planning.
The two biggest parts of this study are obviously the music and the decision, so right away I started compiling a playlist of emotional music. In most studies that deal with emotion, the 4 goto emotions are happy, sad, angry, and fearful. However, I had an idea that, for a decision making task, a more tense piece of music may rush the decision while a more relaxed piece would make the subject think more. So, instead of angry and fearful, I decided to use tense and peaceful.

In papers I have read about music emotion studies, the general consensus is that the emotion of the stimuli cannot be judged solely by the researcher, rather it must be judged by a population similar to the subjects the will be used in the experiment. This means that the first thing I have to do is run a pre-study with a whole bunch of musical stimuli.

While I prep and run the pre-study, I will plan the actual study. The decision to be made in the experiment was making everything difficult. I wanted a decision (could be high or low risk, doesn't matter) that had two option: the first looks like the better choice on the surface, but when you think about it, it is definitely the worse of the two. The other choice is the opposite: looks bad on the surface but after some thought, is actually pretty good. It is VERY difficult to find a decision like this. In fact, I found it nearly impossible. After a few days of research, I gave up on the decision and instead focused on task performance; specifically math. The experiment now studies the effect of emotional arousal level on simple math performance. Earlier in the summer, I read a thesis that discussed the effects of musical arousal (in terms of tempo, volume, and likeablility) on task performance; specifically math and memory. I had a lot of issues with this study, but that doesn't really matter. What's important is that I am using her idea of musical arousal, but instead of defining it by volume or tempo, I am defining it by emotion (which include a whole new brain area).

I am running the study in a simple block design that is streamlined for good fMRI performance. The way the block design works is that I have music emotion blocks, problems set blocks, and rest blocks. Music emotion blocks are simply a piece of music with a given emotion that is about 1 minute long. Problem set blocks are just a set of arithmetic problems. The difficulty will be predetermined by a computer test I am writing. Each p-set will have about 150 problems in it (I think) because the task is to get as many problems as is possible done during the allotted time. A rest block is about 20 seconds long, and is just silence with a blank screen. Each trial is set up like so: a music emotion block and a p-set block are paired and run simultaneously (the piece of music plays while the subject answers problems). After the minute is up, there is a rest block. This is repeated 9 more times (for different conditions). Finally, the entire experiment is repeated to test for accuracy (that may not actually happen).

This is streamlined for fMRI because it has constant stimulus/rest blocks. In the scanner, a study must be designed in this way in order to actually see the activation. By inserting a rest period between each trial, it allows the brain to return to baseline (how the brain fires when nothing is happening). However, before I can run any of the experiment, I still need to run the pre-study.