| Affiliations: | |
| Project Leader: | Hope Hui Rising, Ph.D. hope.rising@tamu.edu Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning |
| Faculty Mentor: | |
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Meeting Times:
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Wednesday 4:00 to 5:00 pm |
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Team Size:
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3
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| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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This is an exciting job opportunity to work on neural and physiological data recorded during cognitive neuroscience experiments and provide insight into depression and PTSD. The student will be responsible for behavior measurement analysis, physiology data analysis, and EEG data analysis. Job Requirement: Basic knowledge about cognitive neuroscience or psychology. Collection and analysis of physiological and EEG recordings using E-prime & AcqKnowledge. Experience in signal processing in Matlab. Experience with survey research and data analysis. Familiar with machine learning in Matlab or Python. Familiar with statistics software, such as SPSS, AMOS, R, or SAS. Experience with mixed-effect model training. Current Progress: Psychology data were recorded by E-4; Psychology data were extracted and stored in mat form. EDA data were cleaned by the SWT algorithm. EDA features on time domain and frequency domain were extracted by the open-source package. HRV data were cleaned by the open-source package. HRV features were also calculated by the open-source package. Preliminary statistics analysis was done
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Team Needs:
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Experience with 1) survey research and data analysis; 2) geographic information system (GIS) and spatial analysis; 3) statistical analysis programs, such as SPSS, AMOS, R, and SAS; 4) experience with structural equation modeling, path analysis, and power analysis |
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Description:
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Exposure to residential road traffic noise has been found to have negative health impacts on vulnerable populations, such as older adults (Sørensen et al., 2011) and children living in poverty (Van Strien, Langeslag, Strekalova, Gootjes, & Franken, 2009). A traffic noise study for Sylhet suggests that schools and hospitals should be relocated about 60 meters away from the roadside unless traffic noise can be alleviated in areas above the recommended level (65dBA) (Alam, Alam, Rahman, Dikshit, & Khan, 2006). Compared to suburban and rural areas, urban areas tend to have smaller building setback distances and narrower right-of-ways. They also typically have fewer vacant lots for relocating schools and hospitals. As building relocations are typically unlikely in urban contexts, interventions within right-of-ways are critical for mitigating the public health implications of traffic noise in cities. Color and light are important considerations in the design of restorative environment (Altimier, 2004; Applebaum, Fowler, Fiedler, Osinubi, & Robson, 2010). Cool or short-wavelength colors have been found to more restorative than warm or long-wavelength colors that tend to evoke high arousal (Yildirim, Hidayetoglu, & Capanoglu, 2011). It is unclear whether the more or less arousing colors may better compete with traffic noise for selective attention, which is a form of sensory intake through the capture of involuntary attention. The proposed visual protocol intends to test the possible mitigating effects of white and 5 principal hues on the impacts of traffic noise to cover a wide spectrum of wavelengths. The most stress-mitigating hue may be used for interior walls, pedestrian lighting, and roadside building facades, street furnishings, and hardscapes for tight urban right-of-ways without sufficient room for green spaces. Water sound was absent in the most recent study focused on the role of water as a restorative component in small urbans spaces (Pradhan, 2012). Researchers found that soothing environmental sound and music had positive effect on health, including stress-reduction and immuno-competence (Caine, 1991; Charnetski, Brennan, & Harrison, 1998; Holm & Fitzmaurice, 2008). Knight and Rickard (2001) revealed that exposure to relaxing music prevented the increases in anxiety, heart rate, and systolic blood pressure due to the presence of stressors. Using the Electroencephalograph (EEG) data of 12 participants, Aly, Kamaldin, Kobayashi, and Huber (2012) discovered that one of the four water sound recordings could help reduce anxiety. Although this study appeared to be the only one focusing on human responses to water sounds, it did not provide strong evidence for the potential stress-mitigating effect of water sounds. Ulrich (1981) revealed that settings with water sustained attention and interest more effectively than those with vegetation. Specifically, water features were found to evoke high levels of preference (Herzog, 1985; Zube, Pitt, & Anderson, 1975) possibly due to water’s attention-holding properties (Ulrich, 1981). However, most of these waterscape preference studies relied solely on the use of visual stimuli for indoor controlled experiments. No significant difference in heart rate and EMG was found between any waterscape groups for the within-subjects protocol by Liao, Yeh, Ou, and Lan (2016) where twelve photographs of 4 waterscape types at 3 scales were presented for 10 seconds each. It is possible that the presentation duration for each image was not long enough to elicit physiological responses as changes in heart rate and EMG. And that a waterscape image at a smaller scale on a monitor may not be an ecologically valid visual representation of the actual experience with a waterscape. The investigator posits that photographs of waterscapes are not ecologically valid representations of the actual experience, particularly for waterscapes with moving water. Changing sensory stimuli tend to capture involuntary attention to preferentially enter our awareness (Nassauer, 1995). This phenomenon may help explain why auditory stimuli are more likely to solicit involuntary attention than static visual stimuli when we perceive the real world. In addition, soundtracks are likely to be more ecologically valid representations of environmental experiences in comparison to monitor-size videos of environmental experiences. It is unclear whether water sounds can better compete with traffic noise for the capture of involuntary attention to better protect residents, pedestrians, and transit users from being negatively affected by traffic noise. The proposed waterscape protocol intends to test whether waterscapes help lessen the impacts of traffic noise. In addition, it seeks to study whether both water movement and sound are necessary for a waterscape to effectively mitigate the impact of traffic noise by comparing the results from using a static waterscape image (with no water movement and no sound), a silent waterscape video (with water movement and no sound), and a normal waterscape video (with both water movement and sound). Stimulus Presentation. Ulrich et al. (1991) found converging results between psychological and physiological measurements by exposing participants to a stressor video and each of the stress-recovery hypothesis videos for 3 minutes each. Although the stimulus presentation was both visual and auditory, the limited size of a monitor may suggest a longer than necessary duration was necessary to elicit physiological responses of sufficient effect size. In addition, separating stressors from stimuli for stress-recovery is not an ecologically valid representation of the experience within right-of-ways or in a roadside residence. The proposed indoor protocol thus uses a virtual reality headset to present each waterscape and color light condition as immersive environments. All waterscape, color light, and walkscape conditions will be presented with traffic noise for 2 minutes instead of 3 minutes. Since the qualities of sound can be influenced by the size and shape of a room, the auditory conditions will be presented with a noise-cancellation headphone (Yokota, Sakamoto, & Tachibana, 2002) so the experiment can be transported into a different room if necessary. Within-Subjects Design. The investigator will employ a within-subjects design for all three protocols because such experimental design enables the study to 1) reduce data collection time; 2) increase statistical power; 3) minimize the number of participants required; 4) avoid analysis of group differences in the absence of random sampling (Bordens & Abbott, 2002; Greenwald, 1976; MacKenzie, 2002). While within-subjects designs tend to be prone to carry-over (Charness, Gneezy, & Kuhn, 2012), practice (Herman, 1985), fatigue (Wilkins, McLeod, Perrin, & Gansneder, 2004), and other sequence effects (McCall & Appelbaum, 1973), these potential confounds can be addressed with careful experimental designs, such as the use of a Latin Square Design (Pollatsek & Well, 1995) and other methods for assigning participants to various sequences of stimulus presentations. To avoid practice effects, the protocols will only employ unconscious psychophysiological measures without behavioral measures that may be contaminated by familiarity and repetition. To minimize fatigue effects typically found in within-subjects design, the experiment will be conducted as three visual, auditory, and kinesthetic protocols so participants can rest in between protocols. To better address carry-over effects between conditions, all conditions will be separated by a 30-second long resting period because an EDA or HRA epoch is typically 30 second long. The psychophysiological measures of these resting periods will be tested to make sure they are not significantly different. If the psychophysiological measures of these resting periods are significantly different, they will be controlled as a baseline variable. All sequence effect will be minimized with counterbalancing and with random assignments of participants to each sequence of stimulus presentation. Project Status. We have collected pilot data for EDA, HRV, and accelerometer from 55 participants and are look for team members to help process signals and analyze the pilot data. We will use the pilot data results to finetune the protocol and collect more data in the future. We will explore adding additional stimuli from another related project conducted outdoor with free exploration protocols in a park with nine waterscapes. Specifically we will analyze its pilot eye-tracking, EDA, HRV, and accelerometer data from 19 participants to determine whether the eye-tracking videos can be parsed out into more ecologically valid visual and auditory stimuli to diversity the existing pool of stimuli. |