Week 9: CNV Catching-and-Cleaning and Composing

Welcome to Week 9! This week I finally felt the rush of seeing what I’ve dreamt about for the last two months!

Announcement: I FOUND CNV!

If you’ve been following along, you know that the Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) signal has led me on an exciting, sometimes frustrating, wild goose chase. Because my participants were generally pretty relaxed in my testing environment (curse my highly comfortable, quiet setup!), this tiny anticipatory brainwave was incredibly hard to create, and later, when processing, it was difficult to isolate from the background noise of the brain.

But after running my software pipeline and tweaking the analysis, the signal finally emerged.

Now, it honestly didn’t look like a textbook perfect wave across the board. In fact, most of the trials didn’t show the CNV at all, which perfectly aligns with the low self-reported anxiety levels I talked about in Week 7. However, a few of the trials showed it exactly when and where I expected to see it, in the “stressor” window of anticipation before the cognitive task.

But here is where I think the science gets super fun: a few trials actually showed the CNV signal when I didn’t expect it. Initially, I was confused, but after thinking back through the experimental script and the timing of the tasks, it actually makes complete sense why an anticipatory buildup would happen in those specific moments. It was such an amazing reminder that brains and science don’t follow the scripts you write for them.

Dashing the Dots 

Finding the CNV was the final missing puzzle piece. Now, my primary focus has shifted to wrapping up  this project in a neat package.

The messy, chaotic raw data is finally starting to tell a cohesive story, and it is an incredibly rewarding feeling.

From Brainwaves to Words 

Of course, it doesn’t matter what I find if I can’t explain it to anyone else! Because the heavy lifting of the data analysis is mostly behind me, I’ve transitioned into full-on writing mode.

I’ve been steadily drafting my formal research paper. The methodology, the literature review, the experimental setup (all the things I painstakingly built in my introductory weeks) are finally making their way onto the page. I’m thrilled to report that drafts for most of the major sections are officially completed!

Looking Ahead 

We are right at the cusp of the finish line. Next week is Week 10!  I’ll be fully finalized, and finally feasting on my product! It’s time to take all this complexity and turn it into plain English so we can actually help students manage the exhaustion of the “waiting game.”

I can’t believe the end is already here.

Thanks for following along,

– Josh Peter