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for Psychology and Neuroscience UG Students

Welcome to the lab. Please read the following page for all details related to your work with us. If you have further questions or would like to contribute to this page, don't hesitate to get in touch with either your supervisor or

@Diar Karim⁠

for access.

Project information can be found on the canvas course:

https://canvas.bham.ac.uk/courses/63845⁠

⁠

General Expectations

You are expected to commit an appropriate amount of time to the project from the beginning of term 1.

Remember to communicate your needs, progress, and any problem that might arise in project meetings and via email.

You need to have read the relevant papers from

here⁠

(or ask for specific references to your project) from the beginning of the project.

All team members who have been given independent lab access, including UG students, need to have an induction to the lab, and this is achieved by reading this guide, especially the health and safety and lab access pages.

⁠

Communications

When writing to lab members, copy in CC your supervisor for their records (the supervisor will not reply to the email). When writing your supervisor, consider having other members of the lab in Cc. Similarly, when replying to emails from lab members, please make sure you use the “Reply All” option instead of the “Reply” option to ensure all relevant parties in the original email are kept in the loop. It is up to you whether to include other students in your research group (if any).

⁠

Meetings

You will have contact with the project supervisor for a total of 10 hours during the course of the project.

As contact time with the project supervisor will be devoted to the scientific progress of the project, contact frequency usually changes over the course of the project. You might meet more regularly with other lab members for the technical development of the project, especially in the November-January period. The project supervisor might be present in some of these meetings, but as the technical development of the project might require substantial time, the supervisor might attend only a portion of the meeting.

When setting up a meeting with a lab member or your supervisor, especially the first few times, ensure you turn up in the lab a few minutes before the meeting starts to ensure you gain proper access to the building or labs.

If you cannot attend a meeting, please inform all relevant parties.

If you cannot find any person in the lab or the Zoom room after 5 minutes from the scheduled meeting time, email the supervisor and any members of the lab helping with the supervision of your project. The chances are that the meeting is taking place in another room, or the link might be wrong.

Each student will lead a meeting per term. This will involve sending a calendar invitation, collecting questions and topics that each student would like to talk about, sending

@Massimiliano Di Luca⁠

@Min Li⁠

@Diar Karim⁠

questions in advance, taking notes about the meeting in this document. Following each meeting, the student is also expected to follow up with

@Massimiliano Di Luca⁠

sending an email with a brief summary or action points by students and members of the team, including in Cc the relevant parties.

Below there is a tentative list of name-date associations for meetings. Please let us know if there are any conflicts

Running Experiments

Before running any experiments with actual participants, several steps must be taken:

Your supervisor approves your ethics protocol, including

consent forms and info sheet⁠

(which should be exactly the ones reviewed by the ethics committee, otherwise an amendment needs to be filed).

There is a risk assessment in place for the activity.

The experiment has been tested and approved by your supervisor.

You have collected data with pilot participants (lab members and peers).

You have analysed the pilot data and discussed it with your supervisor.

You have discussed, and your supervisor has approved, a way to

recruit⁠

(where appropriate, participant recruiting should be done through RPS/SONA), pay or give credit to participants.

Lab spaces are booked using the VRlab calendar (send the calendar invitation to vrlabbham@gmail.com)

Cubicles are booked using the appropriate form available in the Canvas project course.

⁠

Writing your thesis

You are expected to produce a scientific piece of written work in the form of a journal article. This is where you will describe the motivations for conducting your experiment, the background literature, your hypothesis, methods, results, and discussion.

For a good grade, it is essential that you work on a draft well in advance of the deadline.

Check the guideline for your project, and, if allowed, it would be good to use a standard template, as provided here →

Elsevier-template.doc.docx

2.2 MB

⁠

Here is the structure that a paper based on experimental work should have:

Abstract

The abstract is also evaluated for clarity, completeness and choices of details to include.

Introduction

Start with a sentence about the general topic of the work and conclude the paragraph with the motivation for the research.

The literature review should be structured according to the topics covered in your thesis. Each paragraph should have an introductory sentence and a conclusion of what is known about the research and what is still unclear.

The way you write your introduction should lead to the last paragraph: your study plans. It should contain the hypotheses to be tested in the experiment and the predicted results and a summary of reasons for the predictions.

Methods

* Participants

Number and description of the population

Recruitment

Participant compensation

End the section with ethics consideration and approval process

* Materials

Setup, including a description of all hardware with a summary of the characteristics that are important for the experiment (e.g. screen size and viewing distance, resolution, sound intensity). The reader should be able to reproduce the conditions of your experiment only using the details provided here. Consider adding pictures if they could be of aid to the understanding.

List the software employed in the experiment.

Describe any stimuli or media employed in the experiment (audio or visual recording or objects to be touched). Consider adding a figure to show the screen or the stimuli employed and how they were used.

* Procedure

Experimental design

Conditions

Independent and dependent variables

* Analysis

Data processing employed

What kind of statistical tests will be used?

Results

Here make sure you only describe your results and statistics outcomes, i.e. what trends you found and whether these trends and differences are statistically different from one another. Make clear how the results relate to the hypothesis at the end of the introduction but do not include any interpretations which belong to the discussions section.

Discussions

Descriptive summary of the results, what effects you have registered and what you haven’t.

Interpretation of results concerning the hypotheses at the end of the introduction. If you haven’t found what you expected, you should try to reason why this was the case and what could have been done differently.

Conclusions

No new information should be provided here. This is the summary of what you looked for and found.

Say what impact have the results from this study.

You should discuss your thesis as much as possible with your supervisor because this is what you are evaluated on for your final grade (although the work is not graded by your supervisor).

Ethics

students need to write an Ethics statement. This is not marked, but without having uploaded the Ethics statement, they will not be able to submit their thesis. There are sample statements on Canvas;

You need to fill in the Microsoft FORM UG ethics quiz. Look up this information, Sponsor reference number (leave empty), Ethical approval reference number (see ethics page on CODA Admin procedures for the approved protocols), Research ethics board (UoB STEM ethics committee), PI (see on the form), Project title (see on the form), Role of the academic supervisor (see the form).

the statement is 300 words maximum, and students should try to submit a draft to

@Massimiliano Di Luca⁠

via email by the end of this week

in Week 7, a one-to-one progress reviews needs to be arranged using

https://outlook.office.com/bookwithme/user/310eedbbd1834a37b8a2fca67a0ed003@bham.ac.uk?anonymous⁠

⁠

by Friday of Week 8 (17/11/23), students need to submit their final Ethics statement onto Canvas.

Timeline

⁠

Semester 1 (2023)

Draft Ethics statement -Week 5 (w/c 23/10/23)

Progress Review with Supervisor -Week 7 (w/c 06/11/23)

Final Ethics statement - Fri of Week 8 (17/11/23)

Collect two participants data before the end of the year (to have completed most of the steps that allow data collection and to allow to write analysis script)

Last in-person meeting of the year 4/12/23 but zoom call on the 11/12 and 18/12/2023

Semester 2 (2024)

First meeting of the year 15/1/2024

Slide submission - Wed of Week 5 (14/02/24), by 1pm

Oral presentation - Thu of Week 7 (29/02/24), 9am - 5pm

Draft project report - Mon of Week 9 (11/03/24), by 1pm

Draft feedback - Wed of Week 10 (20/03/24), by 5pm

UoB Easter holiday - March 25th to April 22nd

Final report - Thu of Week 11 (25/04/24), by 1pm

General Expectations

Communications

Meetings