My time in the MARC program is officially complete! After completing my presentation and practicing it a lot, I presented at the Wildcat Colloquium. It was an amazing culmination of all the work I've done over these past two years! While I'm no longer a MARC student, my research continues as I prepare to submit a manuscript with my pilot data to the International Journal of Dream Research. I expect to submit my paper very soon and hopefully, it will be accepted! I've learned so much as a MARC student and I'm excited to see how I use the skills I've gained through this program in the future!

I finally finished a full draft of my manuscript, completing both the results and discussion sections. I just need to finish revising my writing, and soon my paper will be complete. I also researched nightmares and nightmare treatment options, and wrote a draft of the introduction for the case study paper. I also have started to prepare for my Wildcat Colloquium Presentation by mapping out what I want to say in my talk. On a very exciting note, the article about my experience in research and at CNS has just been published on the CNS website. Check it out here!

I spent March preparing for and attending CNS! At the beginning of the month, I practiced presenting my poster at a lab meeting and received great feedback on how to improve. After implementing those changes, I presented at CNS! It was such an incredible experience to share my research with the scientific community and to see how many people were excited about my project. I also got to attend the other sessions at the conference - it was great to explore different topics within cognitive neuroscience. I was also interviewed at CNS about completing research while in high school and the article about me will be out soon!

During data collection for my project, we had a very interesting finding with one participant regarding lucid dreaming and nightmares, so we hope to publish a paper based on this one subject. I attended a meeting to discuss and plan this case study paper as I will write the introduction and methods section for this paper. This project and the meta-analysis project have both been submitted to the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) conference. I also created a draft of my CNS poster that I will continue to revise over the next month in preparation for my presentation. I revised my code to work with my new data so I could have updated graphs for CNS. I am also continuing to work on my manuscript; recently I've worked on refining the methods section. 

Recently, I've been working on writing my paper, specifically revising the introduction, drafting the methods section, and writing about my data analysis code. My abstract for the CNS conference was officially accepted, so I'll be presenting my research in March (CNS poster presentation schedule here)! Also, last year I contributed to a meta-analysis project on the reliability of the wake-back-to-bed method. This meta-analysis has just been submitted to the American Psychological Association (APA) conference, and I hope to hear back soon if it is accepted. 

I submitted my abstract to the Cognitive Neuroscience Society! I hope to hear if my submission is accepted in mid-January. I also worked on code for an analysis of the mindfulness task data. Since my experiment uses targeted memory reactivation, I want to see if this method helped participants improve on the mindfulness task. I ran a t-test and a Wilcoxon test and created a graph to represent my analysis. I also added summaries and comments to all of my analysis scripts so they are simpler for others to understand, and uploaded them all to GitHub. 

I finished my respiration analysis code at the beginning of this month! Also, I am writing an abstract to submit to the Cognitive Neuroscience Society poster symposium so I can present my work so far in March 2023. My mentor, Remy, and many other lab members will be flying out to SF for this event to present their work as well. For our data collection, we recently decided to switch to a full overnight study so participants won't have to drive to the lab while sleep deprived, and we are more likely to see REM sleep, as these were issues we were facing. The first overnight studies have run smoothly (we have multiple verified lucid dreams!) and we have a lot more data to work with now!

Continuing my work from last month, I refined and wrote new scripts for my respiration analysis. I began using NeuroKit to analyze respiration rate variability (RRV) rather than just counting the number of peaks. My script is now automated for multiple cues per participant, which means I don't have to manually find the time stamps of the events I want to look at. The script has also been updated to run through multiple cues and multiple participants at once. I've begun stacking my data and will be ready to run a statistical analysis on it soon. Looking ahead, I need to create a new Python script to combine and average all the data per participant, then I will run a t-test and create a bar graph to visualize this data.

I started working on a new Python analysis script this month that looks at participants' respiration patterns. I want to compare respiration during two different points when a participant listens to a specific cue: once during the mindfulness task and once during sleep. I expect the respiration pattern during sleep to slow and be more similar to the mindfulness task, as the cue will remind them of the breathing pattern. This analysis will reveal just how big of an impact the targeted memory reactivation method had on the participant and what other behaviors it affected.

This week we had another participant who unfortunately did not get into REM sleep. We need participants to get to this sleep stage as this is when dreams occur, so it is when we play the cues to reactivate the participant's memory and induce a lucid dream. In the future, we will make sure participants wake up an hour before their normal wake up time so that they will be more likely to have REM sleep. I also wrote code that takes a participant's EEG data and finds all of the rapid eye movements. I also updated my Chi-square analysis code to create a bar graph of the results and updated my other code with Argparse to incorporate the parsing of command line arguments. 

This week I had my first two full morning run-throughs of the experiment (one at 5:30 AM!). We have our methodology running pretty smoothly now. It was great to see the EEG data and I got to practice staging sleep-- this week was my first time seeing REM sleep on the EEG. I also attended another lab meeting and got to hear more about what everyone in the lab is working on. I continued learning Python and this week I wrote a script that takes EEG data, automatically sleep stages it, and creates a few graphs with the sleep stages and marks when the cues were played. 

I learned so much during my first week in the lab! Remy and I first finished setting up the room for participants to sleep, and I learned how to use the Neuroscan software on the computer. I learned how to put EEG electrodes on someone, and I partially ran through my methodology with some research assistants. I also presented my project to the whole Paller lab at my first lab meeting, and we are incorporating some feedback about slightly changing the cue sounds we will use and creating a more explicit connection between the cues and the tasks. Most recently, I began learning Python and wrote a script that will take a data set and run a Chi-square analysis on it. 

In preparation for collecting data starting at the end of this month, I'm learning how to stage sleep. Staging sleep is important because I need to know when participants begin experiencing stage R in order to play the sound at the correct time to reactivate their memory. I also completed Human Subjects Research Training so that I can receive IRB approval and run participants in the lab. I'm excited to travel to Chicago soon and begin collecting data!

I recently met with members of the Paller lab to present my project idea, and received incredibly helpful feedback on my methodology! I updated my experimental plan so that each participant is exposed to both tasks and will listen to both sounds during sleep to create a within-subjects study design instead of a between-subjects design. I also submitted my project proposal and project poster!

I'm looking forward to sharing my progress on my project here throughout the next year! Right now, I am working on my project proposal and preparing for a meeting with other members of the lab where my mentor works. I will present my project to them to get feedback and approval of my methodology, so I am currently creating a more detailed study design figure and thinking about which control task to use.