Internship report ERP lab CLCG University of Groningen

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Internship report

ERP lab CLCG University of Groningen

Michelle Warta (S2729318)

University of Groningen Faculty of Arts Master Neurolinguistics

Neurolinguistics Master’s Internship (LTN000M10) Dr. D.A. de Kok

A. Salcic 4 July 2020

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Introduction

Internship-providing organisation

During my internship I helped carry out research in the ERP lab, which is part of the Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG). The lab is made to carry out EEG research, specifically ERP research for language-related studies. The lab is equipped with two computers and various ERP caps. On one of the computers, the experiment runs for the participants, whereas the other computer stores the output data. The ERP caps are available in three different sizes, and range from 64 electrodes to 128 electrodes. For the purpose of the research I was supposed to help with, we only used the caps with 64 electrodes.

Together with two other interns, I was supposed to help with a project for Aida Salcic, with whom we would set up one of her final studies for her PhD project. During this time, I wanted to become better acquainted with ERP research, possibly even be able to set up my own ERP project.

Internship

Motivation for internship

The reason I wanted to do an internship in the ERP lab rather than a clinical internship, was that I wanted to be involved in carrying out research, and I didn’t have a degree as a speech therapist, which was sometimes required in clinical internships. I have always been interested in doing research, in particular when setting up own projects. I really wanted the experience of creating and completing a full project, including everything from making the stimuli to recruiting participants to analysing results. This is one of the reasons why I felt that an internship in the ERP lab would be a good fit for me.

Another reason was that I wanted to carry out research as well for my Master thesis, which could be combined with the internship. Originally, I was supposed to help with my supervisor’s ERP research in the lab, which was focussed on sentence processing and dyslexia. This would be done together with the two other interns. On top of that, I was supposed to set up my own experiment for the ERP lab, which would focus on hashtags and semantic and world knowledge violations, as well as hashtags and irony. This would be done mostly together with my thesis supervisor, and sometimes some help from my internship supervisor.

Goals

My goals prior to starting the internship were as follows:

1) At the end of my internship I want to be able to carry out an EEG/ERP experiment;

o This includes the preparation of the participation (the cap, the measurements, the tests prior to the experiment)

2) At the end of my internship I want to be able to recruit participants; 3) At the end of my internship I want to be able to make my own stimuli;

4) At the end of my internship I want to be able to analyse data from ERP experiments;

Unfortunately, due to the Corona virus outbreak, the whole experiment could not be carried out the way it was originally planned. Because of this, there were some additional goals:

5) At the end of my internship I want to be able to work with online experiments;

o This includes both online questionnaire, such as SurveyMonkey (SurveyMonkey Inc., n.d.) or Qualtrics (Qualtrics, 2005), as well as online reaction time measures, as are doing through PsychoPy (Peirce et al., 2019) and Pavlovia (Peirce et al.).

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Evaluation

During my internship, I carried out various tasks, which I will sum up below.

➢ I helped with ERP experiments, in the beginning of the internship. Together with the other person present, I was in charge of the measurements, the cap and gel, and carrying out the extra diagnostic tests prior to the experiment;

➢ I helped with making the stimuli, together with the two other interns. We were all in charge of a specific set of verbs, with which we would make sentences. These sentences were graded, and revised, and then graded again, before they were used in any experiments;

➢ As mentioned before, the sentences would be graded by people, and I distributed these stimuli for grading as well;

➢ I used SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics to distribute these stimuli, which helped me become more knowledgeable in how to make online questionnaires;

➢ Furthermore, I was in charge of creating an online experiment through PsychoPy and pavlovia.org. These tasks required me to get a new understanding of how these programs worked, as PsychoPy in particular worked with various settings: e.g. building and/or coding; ➢ I was also tasked with finding participants, in particular for grading the stimuli;

➢ I did a literature search on dyslexia tests used in other studies related to working memory and short-term memory;

➢ Finally, I analysed some behavioural data from a previous experiment carried out by my internship supervisor. I had to calculate how many mistakes people made during the experiment, in which category their mistakes were, whether there was any pattern to these mistakes. While I carried out these tasks, I found that I particularly liked the tasks that leaned more towards carrying out research, such as the ERP experiment, the making of a PsychoPy experiment, and the analysing of the behavioural data, rather than the tasks involved in stimuli creation. These tasks also all encompassed skills I had not yet acquired during any of my previous courses. In particular, during the ERP experiments, I liked the contact with different people, and the diversity of how each experiment would go, as each participant would respond differently.

As for the online PsychoPy experiments, these required me to gain an understanding of basic coding, as well as basic experiment building on another platform than for example E-Prime. Although I initially struggled with the program quite a bit, with the help of professors, instruction videos and a helpful forum, I managed to complete this task sufficiently. Moreover, the learning curve and application of this new skill felt very satisfying to me.

I had used other online questionnaire programs such as SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics prior to the internship, although to a small extent. I found it very nice that I was able to use the knowledge that I already had and apply it in this internship.

I also found that a lot of the knowledge I gathered during this internship was directly applicable to my research for my Master thesis. During this process, I also had to created stimuli, which had to be graded, as well as use PsychoPy to make an online experiment. I feel that, through the repetition of some of these tasks in both my internship and my Master thesis research, I have actually gained more understanding of the process.

From this internship, I did take some extra knowledge and skills that I didn’t foresee when writing out my initial goals. I gained some extra knowledge of PsychoPy experiments, which was not an original plan when starting this internship. I found it very useful, in particular when testing in person is not an option and university and its ERP labs are closed off for testing. I feel that this is an easy yet sufficient way to gather data, as an alternative to ERP data gathering.

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5 On top of that, I gained a deeper understanding of diagnostic dyslexia tests used in research. This deeper understanding was gained through an assignment in which we were tasked with looking up specific tests for specific parts of language processing, such as working memory or short-term memory. Moreover, we used some of these tests during the testing phase, which helped better understand how the tests worked and what their purpose was.

Next to these additional skills, I am very pleased with how I have managed to reach my goals and gain the skills that were needed in order to reach these goals. I am now more proficient in creating stimuli with specific rules in mind, and having the stimuli be graded and evaluated again. Additionally, I now feel very comfortable with gathering some data through online questionnaires such as SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics, which was not the case before the internship. Lastly, even though the amount of time spent on ERP experiments was not very much, and it was only during the beginning of the internship, I feel that I now have a better understanding of how these experiments work, what to look out for when setting up these experiments, and how to run these experiments with participants.

Finally, the only thing I would have wanted to learn more from the internship was how to analyse ERP data. Unfortunately, this was not an option due to the lack of data gathering during the internship. I would have liked to learn this skill as well, as it would have made my understanding of the ERP experiments more complete, I feel.

All in all, I am very happy with the skills I gained during the internship, and the additional knowledge I now have in this specific area of language research. I think the collaboration with Aida went well, as she remained both incredibly supportive, as well as very instructive when the plans of the internship suddenly changed during the pandemic.

Literature

Peirce, J. W., Gray, J. R., Simpson, S., MacAskill, M. R., Höchenberger, R., Sogo, H., Kastman, E., & Lindeløv, J. (2019). PsychoPy2: experiments in behavior made easy. Behavior Research

Methods 51(1), 195-203.

Qualtrics. (2019). Provo, Utah, USA. https://www.qualtrics.com

Internship report ERP lab CLCG University of Groningen