Mind-Wandering Research Data Processing Scripts

A brief, sloppy overview of the data processing steps. This is what I did earlier on, so the scripts do not perfectly correspond with what's described below. I calculated the VTC of each participant by standardizing the RTs, converting the standardized RTs to absolute numbers. Additionally, an important detail to note during this process is that if a participant answered a trial incorrectly or if the participant was not able to give an answer in a trial (missed a trial), I did not include the RT of the trial into the standardization and the final VTC. Afterwards, I also included a column that has subjective mind wandering state answers for every three trials before the mind wandering probe. Then, using the median of the VTC, I binned each trial into either 'in-the-zone' or 'out-of-the-zone' under the Median_Zone tab - 'in-the-zone' if VTC is below the median and 'out-of-the-zone' if VTC is above the median. The SD1_Zone tab binning was based on the standard deviation of the VTCs. Any VTC value greater than standard deviation of 1 was placed into the 'out-of-the-zone' bin, and any trial with lower than the SD=1 of VTC was placed into the 'in-the-zone' bin. Important here to note that any trial with incorrect or missed label was automatically placed into 'out-of-the-zone' bin. In addition to dividing the trials into two bins, I binned the trials into three groups - in-the-zone, middle-of-the-zone, and out-of-the-zone. This is under the Tri_Zone tab. I divided a given subject's trial into three groups by creating three sets all with the same size, then evenly binning the trials based on the VTC value; therefore, for each participant, there are equal number of trials of in-the-zone, middle-of-the-zone, and out-of-the-zone. Our justification of binning the VTC data into three groups is that we hypothesized that we may see bigger differences in EEG data if the deviance between in-the-zone and out-of-the-zone was not clear cut and the VTCs of in-the-zone and out-of-the-zone were not contiguous. Similarly, for the SD_Tri_Zone, I divided the trials by first and the second standard deviation of the RTs. Any trial with VTC below SD = 1 was binned to 'in-the-zone,' between SD = 1 and SD = 2 binned to 'middle-of-the-zone,' and above SD = 2 binned to 'out-of-the-zone.' Again, any trial that was either unanswered or incorrect was placed into 'out-of-the-zone.' There did not seem to be any correlation between subjective reports of mind wandering and VTC. However, there were a couple other interesting findings. Comparing the average of VTCs of trials within the mind wandering probe, we found that trials that were answered yes had an average VTC of 0.755 compared to average VTC of 0.712 for all trials that were answered no. The statistical significance of the difference suggests that the effects are not significant, with the p-value being 0.189 (Student's T-test). Additionally, I looked through the omitted or incorrectly answered trials, which yielded another interesting result. Among the trials in the range of the mind wandering probe, with adjustments* we saw that trials with 'yes' to mind wandering had a total of 54 omission or wrong trials, whereas trials with 'no' to mind wandering had a total of 15 omission or wrong trials. (*Adjustment = subjects with 'all or nothing' was precluded from this. 'All or nothing' entails that the subject either answered yes/no to all the MW probe.) EEG data from the binning is yet to be seen.