My challenge in the past month has been to transition into the school year. Having put in my 10 weeks working on my thesis, I began to get ready for a 3-credit (2-week) field course in Wales at the end of the summer. The most essential thing was to make sure that everything was in place so that a volunteer could collect data for the week I was away while summer courses were in session. I stock-piled food for the freezer, made sure all of my protocols were accessible and went through every aspect of the study. Planning ahead helped me out in this case; I had written detailed protocols, having in mind they were for other people’s use as well as my own. By the time I had left for my trip I was satisfied with my progress this summer. All told I refined the design of my study, collected validated questionnaires, built a pool of references, programmed a computer task, and had 19 participants collected and entered.
Success So Far
Since the last time I wrote, everything has gone better than expected. I got a bit of a late start on recruiting participants because I was hoping to make sure there wouldn’t be any problems with the protocol once I did start. Every participant run whose data can’t be included in analysis means resources wasted in incentives and supplies. This strategy seems to have paid off! There hasn’t been a disaster yet, and I seem to have done a good job of covering my bases. I could certainly still discover problems as I move on to analysis, but I’m satisfied with my effort to avoid that as much as possible.
Go for Launch
The end of May and beginning of June have been spent developing and finalizing protocols for my eating behavior study. While I’ve worked on psychology research in the past, I’ve never been involved in the process of taking a project from conception to implementation. This process has its own unique frustrations and rewards; I’m happy to find it more of a challenge than I had expected.
The Relationship Between Diet and Cognition
Hey all! My name is Stephanie Kane; I’m majoring in neuroscience and working with Dr. Cathy Forestell in the Eating Behavior and Child Development Research Center. I’ve been involved in this lab since this past summer working on a questionnaire-based survey investigating eating habits and personality traits associated with vegetarianism in the student population. Along those same lines, with my honors thesis I intend to investigate the complex interaction between the brain and eating behavior.