Making plans

I sent my 2nd year project proposal off to my potential committee for review, and got some good feedback back from Ed. One of the things he asked is that I describe a better research plan, stating clear procedure, a set of possible outcomes from the procedure, and describing how the different outcomes “will provide evidence that bears on my hypothesis.”

I’ve been sitting down and trying to come up with such a plan, without much luck. The experiments I’m citing are mostly experiments with monkeys and deep brain recordings. There are some imaging studies, but those are more advanced than I want to get into right now.

The only experiment in my lit review that doesn’t require any fancy equipment or monkeys is Yamamoto and Kitazawa’s 2001 study. They were comparing performance with tools to performance without. What they have that I don’t is data about a quirky feature of embodiment–that we get screwed up when we cross our arms–which they can compare to tool use. Without doing more lit review, I don’t know enough about embodiment to create a new experiment with that paradigm.

Nathaniel, one of the older students in my program, did a really cool experiment where he had people do math problems without pencil and paper, and observed all the ways they used their bodies to solve them. That kind of thing really appeals to me because it’s open ended in some way. But he obviously had a clear hypothesis and an procedure that he felt would shed light on it. I’m not there yet.