Psychology, of course!

It's been a while since I've written a post about my psychological research endeavors, so I thought I'd give a little update before I get back to work. First of all, I will soon be running two studies at once, neither of them to do with my thesis project. Why is that, you ask? Well, let me tell you...

Last Thursday, on the only day I have class (as you know), I was getting to know my course mates. We were doing a bit of group work but had a few minutes to kill after our brainstorm, and I was telling them about my experience in patient research, on the subject of aphasia. I got to saying how I wish I'd had time to do more with the study, since I graduated before I could do a 'part II' I had formulated, and I never got around to doing anything over the summer (hard to find subjects, I had already graduated... etc.) Well, one of the girls in my group gave me an idea; she said, simply, 'Why not do part II here?' I was taken aback... why had this never crossed my mind? I mean, why not continue the thing here!?

So I got really excited and e-mailed a lecturer whose specialty was language psychology, particularly reading, and who happened to have some neuropsychology experience... and who also happened to be the course administrator-- just my luck! I met with him and discussed what I had already done, and told him my plan for the follow-up study, and after all this talking he just shrugged and said, 'Go for it'-- that's what I like to hear!

I'm sure you would all like to hear about the research I've planned, so here goes: part one of the research involved a case study of a patient with aphasia, which is a disorder that affects all aspects of language-- reading, writing, speaking. Someone with aphasia might mush a lot of words together to form nonsensical sentences: 'I don't dog what I know have you like?' They might also add a few nonwords to the mix: 'Don't pass pashers on toward him.' What I wanted to accomplish from the case study was to determine the different types of errors the patient would make when reading lists of single words, versus reading passages (a.k.a., natural reading.) Surprisingly, very few studies of aphasia have done research on passage-reading, and I don't know why-- maybe because the disorder is worse in some patients and it is much too difficult to read single words, let alone paragraphs.

My patient had the degenerative version of aphasia, but she was still pretty early on in the disorder, and so could still read passages fairly well. What we found was that there were, in fact, significant differences in the types and amount of errors the patient made, which could indicate that different mechanisms may be involved in single word reading and paragraph reading, and once you think about it, it's obvious-- more long-term processes are used for paragraph reading, and you must have a more complex method of comprehension to string the sentences together to form a coherent whole. (We also tested her on her sentence-reading ability, but there were no significant differences found there.)

So I gave my patient a bunch of passages to read, and I had all this data, including recordings of the patient's speech, and answers to multiple-choice questions I gave to her to test her comprehension. Some of the details of the passages were inconclusive-- how could we assess her comprehension of the multiple-choice test, for example, when we had nothing to compare it to? Well, here's where part II comes into play...

Now, I like to mess with people. Normal people, that is. And I've already told you I'm going to try to induce neglect in normal people by overloading their attention. Well, I'm going to induce aphasia in normal people, too. This is how it's done: I've studied the audio recordings of the patient's paragraph reading, and transcribed her words phonetically. For example, when given the sentence, 'The island of Ireland is often called the Emerald Isle,' she said, 'The islands of Eyelid as often ask the Eirmol Is.' Did you understand that second sentence? Would you be able to understand a whole paragraph of that? What I did, was I wrote out all the passages 'as dictated by JPS' (the patient), and now I will give them to normal people to read. Then they'll have to answer questions about each passage. Then I'll see if their grades are worse than the patient's. If normal people score worse, then we'd know the patient was able to comprehend parts of the passages that she was unable to pronounce. If normal people score better, then we'd know the patient made comprehension errors on top of pronunciation errors. Either way, we learn something interessant.

So, that is what I'm going to do, hopefully next week. A follow-up to a study I never thought I'd revisit. Probably around the same time, I will administer my psychometric test of imaginativeness (something I had to write up for class... definitely not my choice, to do a personality test.) Psychometric testing is just a fancy way of saying 'survey', and people just have to read a list of items: 'I have a vivid imagination'; 'I tend to daydream'; 'I was afraid of the dark as a child'; and then indicate the extent to which they agree with each statement using a range from 'Strongly Disagree' to 'Strongly Agree'. Survey research. Qualitative research. Which can then be quantified in SPSS. But nonetheless, not the most accurate kind of study, which is why I'm not too fond of it. I guess it will be a new experience, and I will learn something about another type of experimental research, I suppose. And I get to create my own psychometric test. And the word psychometric is just really cool.