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.