go away!
2006-07-18 | 8:36 p.m.

Well, now I just feel guilty.

I signed up as a participant in a couple of reasearch studies out of Beatty Hall. And when I say I signed up, what I mean is that the PhD students running the studies wandered into the lab and asked if anyone was interested in participating, and I said yes.

Hey, I get $15 for the one, and $50 and a picture of my brain for the other.

This is what happens when you work in a building where everyone is doing non-invasive human-subject research.

Anyway. The one I did today was a semantic-relationship task. I sat down in front of a laptop, and the computer flashed pairs of words at me, very quickly, one after the other. My task was to decide whether or not the two words were semantically related (so, for instance, "desk" and "chair" are related, "desk" and "homework" are related, "desk" and "office" are related ... "desk" and "water" aren't). It sounds easy, but since you have to answer as fast as you possibly can, it's not.

So. I was about a third of the way through the word list, when I heard keys in the door. Uh-oh.

Then the door opened.

"Hi," someone said. I thought I recognized the voice as one of the other PhD students, one I'm kind of friends with.

"Can't talk!" I cried. "Doing a study!"

"Oh," she said, and walked into the room, all noisy and distracting.

"Go away!" I cried.

And she did.

...

*buries face in hands*

Well, don't I just feel like a total jerk now.

But it was hard! And she was distracting me! That's a confound! It could have led to my data being excluded from the study!

I wanted to apologize to her, afterwards, for screeching at her like a demented hyena, but I couldn't find her. So I'll have to find her tomorrow.

And the day after tomorrow, I'll be going in for an fMRI. The task for that one is just reading and repeating words. So, not hard. I doubt there'll be any screeching on my part.

Especially since it's pretty much impossible to walk into an MRI when someone's in there.

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