Day 25: Organization and Orchestra

Everything is suddenly so clear! I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We senior-project-doers have less than a month to complete our final product AND presentation, and fortunately, I've completed a detailed outline of both my paper and my presentation--so detailed that really all I have to do is paraphrase a few paragraphs, then copy from my outline and paste into my paper. I'm excited (as you should be) to see the outcome.

On the other hand, I will not be in the lab the next few days because I will be going to Disneyland along with all my friends in our school band/orchestra/instrumental ensemble. But hopefully I'll come up with an update for you tomorrow on this exciting new development!

In the meantime, since I learned more about it today, let me discuss with you a little bit about how trials are conducted.

P and P&F stand for Position and Position AND Force Application, respectively.

The image above contains all the cues needed to conduct our planning/preparation experiment. During these cues, the subject must remain as still possible since the data we need must be collected before they do the action. The cues light up in a similar manner as in the image below.

The location of the yellow dot is a lot more random though

There is only a second between each cue (except in between the Go → Ready cues because we must allow a reparation period). We use TMS between the Ready cue and within 500 ms after the Go cue to measure excitability. We continue collecting data 500 ms after the Go cue to allow the brain to process the visual information from the Go cue. TMS is used, in the case, to help measure the difference of excitability needed to position the fingers (P) and to position + apply force (P&F).

So now... I'm trying to analyze the data I organized yesterday. I'll post my discoveries next time!