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Ariel Tao - Week 3

The third week of my lab started with a testing with Elizabeth at a participant’s house. Testing was something that I always wanted to do since learning about this lab in the late fall. When I skyped with my lab PI and graduate student in December, I was told that most of the testing would be done in March, and I might only have a few leftovers to finish with a research assistant. Thus coming into the lab, I had three testing to go to. The first one was last Sunday at 12. My undergrad student Elizabeth drove an hour to get to the participant’s house, where a pair of twins and their parents welcomed us. I watched Elizabeth set up equipment (a lab laptop for the flanker test, a think binder for other cognitive tests, and a recorder). Then I sat and watched kids to play games that were designed to be cognitive tests. On Wednesday, Elizabeth and I went to a sketchy neighborhood for testing. The participant and her family were very kind to us as well, and I look forward to my last testing on this Sunday.
For data analysis, I continued to use SPSS to do analysis of variance for comparing kindergarten and first grade data. I found that there were no strong significance of ensemble music treatment to better performance in cognitive tests such as dot counting, category fluency, and reverse digit span. However, for tasks that involved children’s choice on scales of cognitive competence, school liking, and self-perception, I observed significant differences between the treatment group and the control group. I will talk to my PI and graduate student more about this observation in the coming week.


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