Learning to read your brain(waves)
So, today marks a minor milestone for me, as I ran my very first study of comics looking at people’s brainwaves. The image here to the right is from that first participant, and each of the lines is of a different type of sequence that we are experimentally testing.
So, what does this tell us?
Absolutely nothing.
Yet.
Data from one participant doesn’t say much, but give me a few more weeks and these waves will be (hopefully) showing interesting information about how the brain processes sequences of images.
Comments
Looking forward to the results. I'm giving a presentation about comics to the Mensa Gathering next year and this is the kind of stuff that could really help illustrate some of my points.
Your experimental data looks intriguing. I'm not sure if my questions are answered elsewhere, sorry.
1. What was the stimulus or stimuli?
2. What independent variable is reflected in the four overlaid graphs?
3. What are the units and coordinates of each axis?
4. What is the experimental setup?
5. What are the experimental and statistical designs?
That information is not listed anywhere, nor will you find me releasing it anytime soon… this is just the first participant out of ±24 intended. If there's one thing I've learned in school, good science requires patience!
Do you plan to study the brains of people who can read languages like Japanese or Akkadian?
For this study, and most that I do, we'll just be studying English speakers. We don't want to introduce more variability into the study that is necessary. If we were to do such a study, it might be interesting to contrast English speakers with other language speakers.
However, I'd guess we'd see minimal differences between the groups. Bigger differences would probably come between, say, "comic readers" and "non-comic readers."