Beauchamp:iEEG EMU SOP

Instruction SOP for EMU patients (Jan2022)

Overview

This is an SOP for giving instructions about Noisy Speech project to EMU patients.

Click here for detailed steps in PDF format.

Instruction to give to the patient when you are introducing our research project

Hi, my name is …, I am a (research assistant/graduate student) in Dr. Michael Beauchamp’s lab. Thank you very much for volunteering to participant in research. Today I am going to show you some movies and will try to collect some data through the implanted electrodes to help us understand more about speech. In the movies, there will be a speaker saying one single English word. I would like you to try your best to GUESS the word that you have just heard, and repeat it loudly for me.

There are three types of movies: 1) in the first type of movies, you will only hear the word, but not seeing the face of the speaker; 2) in the second type of movies, you will only see the face of the speaker, but not hearing his/her voice; 3) in the third type of movies, you will both see and hear the speaker. Sometimes the words will be easier to guess, for example, you may hear clear words, while the others may be hard, for example, some words are mixed with loud noise.

For all movies, I would like you to try your best to GUESS the word that you have just heard/seen. It is ok even if your guess is not an entire English word, for example, you may have heard “p” from the word “park”, then you can just say “p-something”, this also helps. If you really cannot guess, you can say ‘NOT-SURE’.

You can choose to stop participating at any time you like, but we do appreciate your best effort in helping out research!

Do you have other questions? If not, let me set up and we can begin.

Before starting the experiment, please check:

 1- Does the MATLAB script that you are going to use today work on the computer you are using now?

To test, just run the script (e.g., ‘run1’) in MATLAB, and see if the movie can start playing on the monitor.

 2- Does the audio work?

To test, play one example stimuli (only the audio, before the patient sees the monitor), and ask the patient if he/she can hear the word loud enough. We usually try to set the computer volume to 100% and set the audio control box to the same point (can be marked using a marker), so that every patient is getting the same volume.