My second week at the Gabrieli Lab went by with much progress.
On Monday, I finally met Zhenghan, the postdoc I am working for, who explained to me both my project and the big picture of the experiment. As I explained in my previous blog entry, my project is to find out the time it takes for the subjects of all three groups to respond to the non-word stimuli. The goal of the experiment is to find any overlapping characteristics of language impairment in Autism patients and SLI patients. Zhenghan also emphasized that I should use Python for all data analysis after I create the spreadsheet with the average durations for each subject. Using Python, she wants me to add a column for each spreadsheet to indicate the Subject ID and to calculate average response time for all subjects as well as for all syllable groups (i.e. average RT for 2 syllable words, 3 syllable words, etc.). She also told me to graph the these calculations using Python. Zhenghan explained to me that she wants me to master Python by the end of the summer, as it will help me substantially in the near future. Thus it is my "mission" to complete all the tasks with Python.
After the meeting with Zhenghan, I continued filling up the spreadsheets for each subject. Many of the soundfiles required me to play around with the script because Praat kept giving me different error messages. And for many of these soundfiles, I had to remove unneccessary noises that Praat was catching up as the subject's voice using Audacity.
On Tuesday, Mr. Honsel visited me at the lab. We met with Zhenghan and had a chat about what I have done so far and what I will be doing for the next 5 weeks. Then, we went upstairs to show him where I work, and I showed him Praat and the soundfiles that I was working on.
On Wednesday, the weekly reading group for Undergraduates and High School students met to discuss the relationship between stress and memory. Allyson, the speaker, talked mostly about why a little bit of stress enhances the memory while prolonged stress does the opposite. She explained the basics of how and where memory is formed, and then talked about more specific details on stress and memory such as the MR and GR, which are different receptors that get released when we are stressed. With little bit of stress, the body reacts by releasing only the MR, which enhances our brain functions, but with a lot of stress, the body releases mostly GR, which does the opposite of MR.
On Thursday, I finally completed the spreadsheet for all 25 subjects, which turned out to be a quite time consuming process. I had to edit the script frequently for the Subject Onset, and had to run Scanner Onset again for most of the files, as I had to cut out the random noises in many of the soundfiles. Then, I looked for online resources that would help me figure out how to use Python to manipulate Excel spreadsheets, but they were mostly very hard to understand with my limited knowledge of the language. So I decided to finish the Python tutorial on Codecademy before I start looking at the manuals on how to edit Excel spreadsheets.
I finally completed the Python tutorial this morning and I am about to start teaching myself how to analyze data in Excel spreadsheets using Python with the tutorial videos I found on Youtube. Hopefully I will be able to learn quickly so that I can apply them to my project soon.
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