Week 3
Let’s see, this past week I was assistant data collection manager for our art study. That means I helped the data collection manager run our tests. We set up the experiment about 10 minutes before people were due to arrive and then I would wait for people to show up at the front door, greet them and direct them to the testing room. The whole thing is quite simple. Each participant has 4 example drawings in front of them and they are given a stack of similar drawings to sort. The idea is to match each of the drawings to the example that it most resembles. Participants are given up to 45 minutes to sort the drawings, but so far no one has taken more than 15 minutes. Also as part of the art study, we spent a good deal of time visiting classes on campus to recruit people for the study. This is probably the most discouraging aspect of the experiment; we are set up to run only 4 participants at a time and therefore have only 4 slots for people to sign up for each day, but so far we have had only about 50% of the participants actually show up during their assigned times. This will make getting our goal of 70 to 80 participants very difficult if things continue at this rate. We do not collect any contact information to allow us to remind people to show, though we do have a reminder slip that they can take with them if they sign up on one of the forms. Recruitment continues this week, as does data collection until the last week of the program. Hopefully attendance rates will improve, though I doubt it. This coming week, I am data manager. Not to be confused with data collection manager, the data manager is in charge of inputting all of the resulting data into the computer and getting someone to double check the entries. More on that in the next entry.
Reliability testing continued last week as well. I finally scraped by and passed my hierarchy tests by convincing the grad student grading my test that a behavior occurred that was not on the answer key. Hooray! I began live practice sessions that same afternoon, though the chimps did not give us many interactions to work with when we tried observing them in their main living quarters. The following day I got to practice observing them in the night cage area. Holy crow was that crazy! There are a ton of interactions in the night area because they are receiving dinner and the chimps are busy interacting with humans as well as each other. It is extremely difficult to monitor both the interactions that occur and the times at which they occur simultaneously. Interactions often overlap, with one beginning while a prior one is still going on, or humans interacting with multiple chimps at the same time. It is crazy, but I am looking forward to the challenge. I am doing one more practice session in the night area tomorrow and then I think I will try doing it for real later this week. I am already signed-up to do 2 observations in the main area tomorrow morning. We are observing the chimps in 15 minute periods. From 9 to 10 I believe we observe them non-stop for the whole hour, then we do a single 15 minute observation at the beginning of every hour for the rest of the day (except during lunch) and one person observes them in the night area while they eat dinner each evening starting at 4:30. There are supposed to be 2 people assigned to each regular shift, one to observe outside and one to observe the east and west rooms. I am hoping someone else has volunteered so I don’t have to do my first set of observations alone!
Context coding reliability testing continues. I did poorly on the first test, but came close to passing the second one with an 80%. I took a third one at the end of the week and expect I will pass it. I should find out tomorrow. That would leave one more test to pass before I am ready to do actual context coding. It is not as fun as hierarchy observation, since it just involves watching a bunch of video, but it is still good training.
I also got a brief lesson on how to upload and dub video for another project. For another side project, a few of us are helping one of the grad students prep videos for her thesis. The thesis is examining whether the chimps are more or less precise when signing with familiar versus unfamiliar human caregivers. From what I understand, the clips will be paired up so that each set has an interaction with a familiar and unfamiliar human signer and people will be asked to determine which chimp sign was more precise out of the 2 choices. We are isolating individual instances of signs from each of the chimps and blurring out the humans they interact with, so that people who grade the clips will not be bias as a result of recognizing a human signer. It is largely busy work, but it is for a good cause and it is yet another skill to add to my resume.
As for leisure activities, Most of the apprentices, including myself, have made arrangements to go visit chimpanzee sanctuary in nearby Cle Elum in a few weeks. More on that when it happens. My housemate Leah now has a job (house cleaning), so I have greatly reduced access to transportation. I am hoping this will motivate me to spend more time getting to know the other apprentices, but I fear it will just mean I spend more time alone in the apartment. We shall see how it goes.
Peace out!