Progress

Wow, the past two weeks have flown by!

Since last time, I've been mainly working on getting the Android experiment up and running. As of Wednesday, it is! We ran several more pilot participants early last week to work through some technical issues with the assessment app and finalize the experimental design. One important detail that needed to be worked out was the number of pings and the time between pings during the walk. This proved to be tricky as the more pings (and therefore data points) the better for assessing the psychological changes that are occurring during the walk. However, more pings also mean more interruptions throughout the walk which could alter the experience, and we want to avoid that. We've settled on 25 minutes between pings, and have hopefully achieved a good balance between collecting enough data without jeopardizing the experience. 

The locations for the nature and urban walks also needed to be finalized. While the Dish was the planned nature location, getting participants to entrance is a bit of a hassle. The Margeurite doesn't go directly to the Dish, so getting there involves taking a shuttle partway and then walking. Each trip, there and back, takes about 30 minutes. This is doable, however Lake Lagunita has turned out to be a great alternative for the nature location! It takes under 10 minutes to walk the participants to and from the starting location. Also, in some regards the loop around Lag is more of a "nature" experience than the Dish as there are more trees, a dirt rather than paved trail, and the walk does not feature a giant, man-made radio telescope. However, there are also disadvantages with using Lake Lagunita for the nature walk, one being the shortness of the loop. We want participants to be on about a 75 minute walk so that we can ping them several times with sufficient time between pings. A lap around Lag only takes about 15-20 minutes, so we are having participants complete 4 loops. While the nature destination has been resolved, the urban walk location is still up in the air. The starting point for the urban walk now needs to be about a 10 minute walk away and a 1 mile loop, in order to replicate the nature trail. Stanford has apparently done a great job of keeping our campus green, as we're having trouble finding a place within 10 minutes walking distance of Jordan Hall that is sufficiently urban! If you have any ideas for such a loop, please let me know!! Solving the urban location situation is pretty huge, and will be the first thing we tackle tomorrow!

Well, four weeks in and a whole lot of progress! The technical problems with the assessment app appear to have been mostly worked out (cross your fingers!). We now have usable data from three participants, and as soon as the urban location is finalized the Android experiment will be in full swing! In addition to continuing to work on the Android project this week, I will also be working with Melissa to get the self-awareness online survey up and running. Excited to see what week five brings! 

Beginnings!

Hello and welcome to my research blog! 

This summer I am working on a project looking at the psychological and mental health benefits nature provides us. For centuries, works of poets, musicians, and philosophers have asserted that spending time in nature is beneficial (anyone else read Thoreau in AP lit?). I imagine many of you have also had experiences where spending time outdoors led to you feeling refreshed and relaxed. But what aspects of psychological functioning are actually affected by nature experiences, and what is it about nature that causes these effects? Recently, a growing body of scientific work has begun to study nature's psychological benefits as well as look at whether being deprived from nature has negative implications. Some pretty awesome work has been done!* Yet, the answers to those questions are still largely unknown, so that's where we come in! By the way, 'we' refers to myself, Melissa Wibowo who is another undergraduate, and our research advisor Greg Bratman who is a PhD student in the E-IPER program. Together, we're working to better understand the rejuvenating powers of nature, and having a pretty great time in the process (so far anyways…). 

We're conducting two projects this summer to address our objective. One experiment involves investigating a potential theory for why nature experiences are beneficial. More on this later, but the theory essentially has to do with decreased self-awareness after spending time in nature. I spent most of my first week doing background reading and developing the experimental design for an online survey that will be a stepping stone for this experiment. Early last week Melissa and I created the survey, and while there are a few details to work out it should be ready to launch soon! 

Our primary experiment is looking at the psychological impacts of nature vs. urban walks. What's new and exciting about this project, is that we're collecting real-time data via use of an Android phone, rather than collecting only before-and-after data. We expect that real-time data will provide insight into when psychological functioning and mental health effects begin to take place, when they peak, and how they change throughout the experience. Essentially, we will send participants on either nature or urban walks with the Android, and will periodically "ping" them throughout their walks. Once "pinged," they will complete a series of assessments that measure various aspects of mood and cognitive functioning. The participants will take pictures of their location upon completing the assessments, and we hope to tie changes in mood and cognitive functioning to landscapes. We piloted this experiment on Wednesday to test out the experimental design and data collection with the Android. We have a few technical issues and design details to work out, but overall the pilot ran smoothly and was quite promising! I'm excited for week three! 

*Check out http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/easing-brain-fatigue-with-a-walk-in-the-park/ to read about a study that used portable EEGs to study cognitive impacts of green vs. urban spaces, and http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110622/full/474429a.html for a study that used fMRI to show how urban living affects the brain. Pretty crazy-cool stuff!