Housekeeping

Reality Bending Lab

Welcome!

• About ReBeL
  • Reality
  • Role of Bodily Signals & Will/Control
  • Metascience
• About myself
  • Neuropsychologist
  • French
    • clumsy with words
    • direct
  • Music
• About you
  • Who are you? Background? Interests?
  • What would you like to do later (career)?
  • What skills / experience are you interested in developing?

Supervision

• Weekly lab meetings
  • Presence expected
  • Presentations
  • Occasion to touch base
  • Take notes during discussions
• Individual meetings and emails
• Group chat (discord)
  • Also for you among yourselves
  • memes friendly
• Send emails / messages whenever, but don’t expect an immediate answer
• Feedback style
  • Not a lot of positive reinforcement _{^{(I’m working on it)}}
  • A lot of corrections doesn’t mean it’s bad
  • I have a tendency to rewrite code
• Do always clean off track changes when sending a new version

Be Collaborative

• Teamwork
  • Lab mates are your best resource
• Good grades are not at the expense of others
  • Helping others will be noticed and will benefit you
• Acknowledge those who helped you
  • Research is not a zero-sum game
  • Give credit where credit is due

Be Open

• Independent intellectually does not mean all-knowing
• Seek help
• Be transparent

Conventions

• No spaces or weird characters in folder and file names
  • c'est mon mémoire!.docx
  • PreregDraft_Makowski.docx
• CamelCase vs. snake_case
  • Also applies to programming

Project Structure

"

                |-- .../Box/ProjectName/ - Internal folder (within the lab)
                |                        - Raw data files (deanonimyzed)
                |                        - Data formatting scripts (anonymization)
--YourComputer--|                        - Internal documents, drafts, litterature
                |
                |-- .../ProjectName/ - Public-facing repository
                                     - Open-access (shared on GitHub)
                                     - Anonymized data
                                     - Analysis scripts
                                     - Contains all materials for reproducibility
                                       - Experiment script
                                       - Link to preregistration
                                       - stimuli
"

Projects exist on our computers in 2 separate folders (with the same name):

• Internal (shared by supervisor via Box)
• Public (synced with GitHub)

Research Projects - Overview

• Personal projects _{^{(not recommended)}}
• Body and Mind _{^{(physiological signals)}}
• Illusions and Reality Perception _{^{(neuropsychology and consciousness)}}
• Fiction and Arousal _{^{(affective neuroscience)}}
• Validation of ultrabrief measure for depression/anxiety _{^{(clinical psych)}}

Timeline

• Term 1
  1. Familiarize with project
  2. Implement & test paradigm
  3. Week 8 (20 November): Submit ethics
  4. Project presentation
  5. Write introduction and methods section
  6. Submit preregistration
• Term 2
  1. Data collection
  2. Data analysis
  3. March: Final project presentation
  4. Write up
  5. Celebrate 🎉

Canvas info

• Dissertation Overview

Marking Criteria

• Scientific quality of the dissertation
  • The closer to a scientific paper the better
  • Show that you read papers beyond what was provided (intro)
  • Show that you understood the results and put them in perspective (discussion)
• Amount of work provided
  • Paradigm implementation _{^{(if applicable)}}
  • Number of participants recruited _{^{(if applicable)}}
• Not influenced by significant results
  • Having found “no significant” effect / hypotheses not proven is absolutely fine!
• Strongly influenced by participation/involvement during the whole year

To-do for next meeting

• Onboarding (https://github.com/RealityBending/Onboarding)
  • GitHub basics
  • Add your profile on the lab website
• Install R and R-Studio locally
• Think about projects

Research Projects

1. Body and Mind

Common Paradigm

• Resting State
• Tapping Task
• Heartbeat Counting Task (HCT)
• Interoception questionnaires (MAIA and IAS)
• Primal Beliefs scale

Subprojects

1. Measuring Interoception: Objective vs. Subjective
2. Measuring Interoception: Tapping Task
3. Interoception and Primal Beliefs
4. Interoception and HRV (during Resting State)
5. Interoception and HRV (during HCT)

Notes

• Physiological equipment
• Less flexibility (physical presence, room booking management)

2. Illusion Sensitivity

Common Paradigm

• Illusion Sensitivity Task
• Normal and Pathological Personality Scales
• Hypnosis Suggestibility Scale
• Conflict Resolution Task (Flanker Task)

Subprojects

1. Illusion sensitivity vs. Personality
2. Illusion sensitivity vs. Suggestibility
3. Illusion sensitivity vs. Cognitive Control

Notes

• More flexible (portable experiment)
• Implement Flanker task (in JsPsych)

3. Fictional Reappraisal

Common Paradigm

• Investigate the effects of reality beliefs modulation on emotions related to erotic stimuli
• Conceptualize and build an experiment
• Questionnaires of emotion regulation skills

Subprojects

• Intraindividual Effects
• Interindividual Correlates

Notes

• Conceptualization and implementation steps necessary
• Possibly physiological signals (?)
• More work required

4. PHQ-4R

Common Paradigm

• PHQ-4: Ultra-brief assessment of Anxiety and Depression
• Testing the benefits of adding a new response option
• 2 groups: original PHQ-4 version vs. revised
• Correlation with other depression/anxiety measures
• Does the revised version improves the correlation for mild mood fluctuations

Notes

• Flexible
• Research needed on convergent validity for mood disorders assessment

Make your Choice

• Questions? Clarifications?
• Pick 2 (first and second choice, from two groups)

Next Week

• No lab meeting on Friday, instead…
• JRA Poster session
  • Wednesday 18t, 12-2pm
  • Woodlands 2 & 3, Student Centre