2011-12-14

Yesterday, I run a set of pilots about monitor angle, how to hold the electronic pencil and the time. I gave them two to three minutes as training session, and then asked them to do the pressure control. I collected 15 groups of the data and some valuable feedback. However, the problem for me is I am not sure what to do with those data. Should I analyse them in details? Or  mainly consider the subjective feeling and feedback? What is more, they think with the larger angle (inclining from horizontal), the task is harder. But for me, I have to decide whether to make it harder or easier.

2011-12-13

In the last few days, I focused on the preparation of presentation in the group meeting. Actually, during the preparation, I concluded some current unsolved problems which has to be checked in the pilot. I found that I also have to do some more researches about whether the kinesthetic processing is under the central executive. Yesterday, I finished the implementation of tone counting task and add a confirm button on the interface.

Today, I'll do the pilot of tablet angle, pen angle and duration.

2011-12-06

Today, I learned some details of java.util.logging, understanding it's main components and basic usages. I also discussed my designing with Ronnie and Natalie to clarify some questions, especially whether my experiments can increase the cognitive load to the expected levels. They gave some suggestions about what data to collect in the pilot study.

I also edited a draft of my presentation next week and refactored the experiment code. I think tomorrow I should finish the draft slide and understand the working principle of "listener".

2011-12-05

Today, I attended the regular Monday group meeting in the morning. I think what Dan talked about in his presentation made me rethink about the validity of my experiments, particularly the difficult levels. In my experiments, the primary task remains on the same level, and the reason is that it may be very hard if I shrink the range further down -- but still needs to be proved. Meanwhile, the secondary task has three levels. In the pilot study, I should focus on analyzing the data and to find evidence that participants indeed feel Level 3 is harder than Level 2.

I also organized the steps of each tasks and wrote a detailed description of my experiments containing screenshots of UI and timeline of the experiment. It is in CVS.

2011-11-30

Today, I finished implementing the first version of my primary and secondary tasks.

There are still some points to modify, especially the logging part. The original way in my program to write to a file has two main disadvantages. Firstly, it is hard to separate different participants' data, which increases difficulties in data analysis. Then, open and close files too many times waste time and decreases the speed.

Another important point to think about is how to give feedback of pen pressure to the participants.

2011-11-29

Today, I continued to implementing the experiments. Now, I finish a simple version of primary task, and the UI of the secondary task.

As I haven't got much experience in implementation of user interface, I learned how to use AWT and Java Swing for almost one day. The interface of my secondary task is not complicated, which has 20 radio buttons and two ordinary buttons for the subject to select the sum number of tones.

Additionally, Ronnie suggested use Java Swing instead of AWT. I think the reason maybe Swing is lightweight and independent of platforms.

2011-11-28

Last Friday, after the meeting with the supervisor, I decided to implement the experiment measuring static pen pressure and the secondary task once used by Gerard P. van Galen in "Error, stress and the role of neuromotor noise in space oriented behavior". So today, I started to use JTablet API to implement the primary experiment. Up to now, there are still some problems unsolved. I plan to finish it before Wednesday, and do some pilot testing within the group.

Getting started

Totally, there will be 13 weeks for me to do this project. Ronnie and Natalie have made a clear schedule for me to follow and at the end of the February, I am expected to hand in a report and do a presentation to demonstrate my work to NICTA.

The whole process mainly contains reviewing literature, designing the experiment, conducting the experiment, collecting and analyzing data and writing the report. Currently, I am reading published articles.They helped me to understand some fundamental concepts of working memory and cognitive load. Particularly, one of them summarized three different methods to measure cognitive load and it gave me basic ideas of designing my experiment.

Yesterday, I focused on searching for more articles about experiments to prove relations between pen pressure and memory load, which are close to my topic. Besides that, I kept drawing sketches for different designing ideas.