Building a BSc Thesis 1: Representative Experimental Design

I'm running a student-initiated project for my undergraduate thesis next academic year, where I'm hoping to strap on some eye-tracking glasses on volleyball players while they perform variations of a spiking task. But how did I even come up with this idea in the first place? Over the next few weeks, I'll be taking you through some of the key papers that inspired the project.

To start, I knew I wanted to do something in volleyball. After all, I had spent the past 2 years working as a mental skills coach and skill acquisition consultant for various volleyball clubs, and had not only built a solid network of connections, but also grown quite fond of the sport. Next, I knew that I wanted to use eye-tracking glasses in my dissertation project. Not only was the technology available, but I also had access to a supervisor who was an expert in conducting such research. At this point, it was a no-brainer to capitalise on these currently available resources and expertise.

So, we now have the sport (i.e., volleyball) and the main dependent variable-measuring apparatus (i.e., an eye-tracker measuring gaze behaviour). But what kind of tasks would I want participants to complete? To answer this question, we turn to a paper by Dicks et al. (2010), who examined gaze behaviour differences in football goalkeepers under different task constraints.

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 3.1, Psychological Properties of Sound

Now that we've covered the physical properties of sound waves, we move on to the first part of Chapter 3, which explores the psychological properties of sound. While they may be related, there are some crucial differences between the two. For one, the physical properties of sound waves are the objective features that are independent of the listener. On the other hand, the psychological properties of sound (see Fig. 1), such as pitch, loudness, duration, and timbre, depend on the phenomenological or first-hand auditory experience of the listener.

Fig. 1 Mapping between the physical and psychological properties of sound (Tan et al., 2010)

The Entangled Brain (Pessoa, 2022): Chapter 4, Thinking about Brain Regions

The past few chapters have provided a general overview of the structure of the brain and have also briefly mentioned a few important functions associated with those brain regions. But before we delve deeper into conventionally explored brain regions, one question remains: how should we be thinking about these brain regions? Are we taking a modular view, that is, each region is defined as a spatially isolated area of the brain that carries out its own independent function? Or should we subscribe to Pessoa's view that modularity is an oversimplification, and we should instead be interested in the multifunctionality of regions? This is what I'll be attempting to answer in this post.

Discovering the function of brain areas

Historically, one of the most important methods of uncovering brain function is the use of lesion studies. Briefly, lesion studies explore how different behaviours and mental capacities might be impaired after naturally occurring damage in human brains, or surgically induced damage in animals. One of the most important findings from lesion studies came from Paul Broca in 1961, who concluded that speech impediments in his patient (nicknamed 'Tan') were caused by lesions in the frontal lobe. Meanwhile, other researchers like Hitzig and Fritsch carefully removed different brain areas from dogs and saw movement impairments in their contralateral side (i.e., lesions in left brain areas caused movement impairments on the right side, and vice versa). Importantly, other functions and behaviours were left unaffected in the cases of Tan and the dogs.

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 2.2, The Acoustics of Musical Instruments and Venues

Let's continue looking at the science of musical acoustics. In Chapter 2.1, we looked at the physics of sound, progressing from simpler sine waves to more complex sound waves. In this blog, we'll finish up the rest of the chapter, which looks at how the properties of sound change as a function of differences in musical instruments and venues.

The acoustics of musical instruments

We now move on to applying acoustic principles to musical instruments. The key principle that Tan and colleagues put across is that of coupled acoustics. The idea here is that, within most instruments, there exists at least two sources of vibration. While the first source is what generates the initial sound wave, the second vibrating device is responsible for amplifying that sound wave. The reason for this coupling is that the initial sound wave (activated when the performer vibrates the first device) often does not have enough energy to be propagated through a large space and be heard by others. To solve this, instruments have a secondary device, called a resonator, that is coupled to the first and that vibrates alongside it, thereby amplifying the initial sound wave.

The Entangled Brain (Pessoa, 2022): Chapter 3, The Minimal Brain

In this chapter, Pessoa aims to build a hypothetical 'minimal brain'. Why might this be important? For starters, the brain is an immensely complex organ, and this is even before we talk about human brains! Before we increase the level of complexity and look at more advanced capabilities, we begin by establishing the parts of the brain that contribute to basic animal functions like defending oneself and seeking rewards, that is, survival! 

An aside

Before we move on, I'd like to point out an implicit assumption that runs throughout the chapter -- that the brain is an information-processing computer that processes and transforms input signals to generate some form of output. While commonly conflated, the reductionist view (i.e., that the brain can be reduced to isolated regions of interest) and computational theory of mind are separate. My understanding so far is that while Pessoa rejects the reductionist view of the brain in favour of one that is more integrated, complex, and network-based, he hasn't thus far said much about the brain-as-a-computer analogy.

Coming from an ecological perspective, I naturally reject the computational theory of mind. An alternative exists, though -- ecological neuroscience argues that the brain resonates instead of computes. That being said, I don't yet have the requisite knowledge or vocabulary to provide a comprehensive and convincing overview of this alternative. At the moment, I'll continue using the language as used by Pessoa, and refrain from interjecting with too many anti-computation comments (if only because this might disrupt the flow of the blog). 

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 2.1, The Physics of Sound

In this chapter, we look to the science of acoustics, which explores how sound is produced by a source, propagated through a medium, and received by an auditory system. More specifically, we are focusing on musical acoustics, which Hall (2001) defines as the study of how sound is produced by musical instruments, how architectural design affects sound transmission, and the perception of sound as music. As such, the current chapter explores 3 main areas, namely: the physical properties of sound waves, the acoustics of musical instruments, as well as the acoustics of music performance environments. In this blog, I'll talk about the first area and cover the other 2 in a separate post.

The physics of sound

How is sound produced? Sound can simply be thought of as the transmission of energy from a sound source to a receiver through a medium (usually, air). This process starts with the vibrations of a sound source, which agitate and compress nearby air molecules. These air molecules, now carrying energy from the sound source, then transfer this energy to other air molecules in their immediate vicinity. Importantly, this results in a series of compressions and expansions (i.e., rarefactions) of the air molecules, which can be graphically represented by the peaks and troughs of a sine wave (see Fig. 1), respectively. This oscillating (i.e., repeatedly moving in a cycle) wave is called a sound wave, which is the physical basis of what we know as sound.

Fig. 1 Sound as a sine wave (Tan et al., 2010)

The Entangled Brain (Pessoa, 2022): Chapter 2, Neuroanatomy

Before we go on any further in our journey to understand the brain, we must first take some time looking at the anatomy of the brain. Pessoa underscores the importance of this by referencing biology's axiom, that function is inherently tied to structure. In other words, different structures suggest different functions. Axioms are essentially first principles or fundamental premises on which a science is built. If this is biology's (and neuroscience's) axiom, it is no wonder that neuroscientists are commonly in the business of finding functions performed by specific brain regions. When Brodmann created his map of the brain, he too demarcated boundaries in the brain based on cell shape and size, as well as spatial differences in cell distributions and densities. To him, each of these regions had its distinct structures and consequently, also had its unique functions.

To what extent is biology's axiom true? Are structural properties always uniquely tied to functional ones? Could brains not exhibit forms of redundancy, where different structures perform the same function, or the same structures perform different functions? For now, we'll put these questions on hold. Regardless of the answers, there's no denying that at least some basic knowledge of neuroanatomy will be of use to us. Here, the chapter focuses on 4 main parts of the brain: cortical structures, subcortical structures, neurons, and white matter tracts.

Psychology of Music (Tan et al., 2010): Chapter 1, The Scope of Psychology of Music

This is the start of another book club series, this time on the 2010 book ‘Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance’ by Siu-Lan Tan, Peter Pfordresher, and Rom Harré. I recently had the privilege of meeting Dr Matthew Rodger at the recently concluded European Workshop for Ecological Psychology in Leeds, and during our late-night discussions, we realised that we shared an interest in auditory perception and music. I later found out that he teaches a Psychology of Art and Music module at Queen’s University Belfast, and this was the textbook he recommended for the course.


A brief aside
 
Combining my interests as an amateur music hobbyist and an ecological psychologist, I always thought it’d be cool to find the informational basis of auditory and music perception, and how we might be able to exploit this for music education and development. To give an example in sports training, one application of the ecological approach is to employ representative learning designs. The basic idea here is that, given perception and action are contingent on the detection of specifying information (i.e., information that has a unique 1:1 mapping to the object of perception, such as action possibilities or affordances), coaches should aim to preserve the information that athletes are exposed to (during competition) within the training session.

The Entangled Brain (Pessoa, 2022): Chapter 1, A New Approach to Neuroscience

I’m starting on a new book, entitled ‘The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion are Woven Together” by Luiz Pessoa! Coming from a psychology background that didn’t have a strong emphasis on neuroscience, I’m excited to get deeper into and learn more about the study of the brain and how it relates to behaviour.

 

The choice of book is very intentional. One reason I started adopting an ecological approach to cognitive science was because of the realisation that for far too long, we have been studying the capacities of the mind isolated from the body and environment. The problem with this is that it doesn’t recognise how our brains are embodied, and that we as organisms are embedded within a context. We aren’t simply brains wandering about reacting to stimuli. Rather, we are brains-in-a-head-on-a-body-in-an-environment surrounded by a constant flux of rich information. In other words, instead of looking at individual bits and pieces, we have to look at the system as a whole.