Cat Hicksoh my fking god. I am TRYING to do research for my book right now but I am getting DISTRACTED by the fact that I followed a citation from a paper into another paper and learned that they're interpreting EEG and eyetracking as a way to sort people into "in the flow" or "not in the flow" I AM GOING TO EFFING LOSE IT
I love that this was published in the same overall goddamn umbrella organization that sent me reviewers that said my work had "too much psychology" cited in it I AM. GOING. TO. LOSE. IT.
eyeblinks as a measure of frustration? I'm going to throw my entire laptop into the ocean
this is UNCRITICALLY cited in a BIG paper with NO reference to it being a biometrics study AT ALL
I mean. Can we measure things with EEG and with eyetracking, yes we can. Can we detect different kinds of waves yes we can. Do blinks correlate with something, I don't know, probably. This is all just so effing strange.
how is engineering the most critical field with the LEAST critical research I've ever seen. Do you guys just think if something is published in Fuck All Journal, 2024, that makes it good?
ML CLASSIFIER ON SIX DATA POINTS WHAT IS HAPPENING
Movement dominates brain activity, and is ALSO a huge artifact in any skin conductance. So like THAT'S a confound in these conditions. Yet no details at all about how this is truly analyzed, because it's an off the shelf EEG "band" someone bought with some research cash I bet. This paper is "we thought this was cool and so we bought a lot of stuff and tried it."
What's the play guys. What's the thing. Are we going to believe developers are human beings if we count enough eyeblinks and say they're systematically different if you focus harder? Are we going to unlock the magical super Computer Brain region if we measure hard enough?
MY WIFE PUBLISHED A PAPER ABOUT HOW MOVEMENT DOMINATES BRAIN ACTIVITY AND NEEDS TO BE ACCOUNTED FOR IN MEASURES AND NONE OF THESE GUYS READ IT
one of the measures is defined as capturing "various emotional states" I am dying
somebody made like twelve tables for this paper. Just like, table after table of everything they could tally up. NOT ONE OF THESE THINGS SHOWS KEY INFORMATION ABOUT THE EEG. This is like the baseball statistics version of analysis. Just tallying up as many numbers as possible. "mean task completion" across like six people which tells us fuck all about fuck all stfu
look, it's not that I wish anything but healing upon these people who wrote this paper and don't know better. it's just that you're so underserved. You're so underserved and you don't even know it. Somebody is serving you up a plate of raw hamburger paired with rat shit in the back alley next to the dumpster and telling you it's fine dining. You (software developers) BUILD THE WORLD. YOU COULD GET A NICE MEAL ONCE IN A WHILE.
You're stuck. We're all stuck. We're stuck in the back alley trying to say please god believe I have emotions look at my eyeballs WHO PUT US HERE
"we deleted all measurements that were marked as invalid by the eye-tracking device"
ahahhahahahahahhahhahahahhahahahahahhaaaaaa
they extracted??????? eyeblink "data"????? FROM THE EEG??????? what
are we treating the artifact AS the measure now
oh, I see, the sensor (purchased from some random website) has "two pre-processed signals" omfffffg YOU GUYS. HOW IT IS PROCESSED IS THE POINT
we're going to say that brain waves are predictive but not say WHICH brain waves we're talking about?
"finding relevant code" vs "not finding relevant code" are two sides of the classification how much do you want to bet this is essentially categorizing scrolling and skimming vs "not scrolling and reading" which is, again, A MOTOR MOVEMENT among many other things
The obsession with the idea that we are detecting "higher order problem-solving" via Secret Signals in the Skin
I forced my neuroscientist wife to look at this paper from a signal processing POV because she's actually published on the complex math of signal processing (and because I am not above outsourcing my complaining) and in her characteristically gentle spirit she said "many things could be extremely misleading, there's no way to know with what is being reported" I am going to translate that for you: GARBAGE IN GARBAGE OUT
Do you all want to know something super funny, the lab I did my PhD in actually did EEG work as well and THIS is why I NEVER talk about it, early in my tech career someone was like "omg you should put on your resume that you can do EEG and eye tracking and your entire career in UX will be set!" And I said no thank you, I will never! And ever since then people have mistakenly said I was "Qualitative" and maybe "not a scientist" but I sleep at night, so
Baffled by the idea that we should divide brain states into two categories that seem to mean "thinking about stuff" and "chilling" and some of these activities under the "chill" category do not sound chill at all unless we're talking about taking a nap
Stress is mentioned as a possible threat to validity when I think it's probably actually the entire ball game if you're forcing people to solve a coding task in a lab setting
Stress+ motor movements, that's what I see
Jazz Rabbit 🐇🏳️⚧️@grimalkina oh no oh no are they using the ThinkGear TGAM chip? It provides two preprocessed values for “attention” and “meditation” from the EEG wave data. These are good enough to make a toy that responds to vague brain activity. But no way no how is it possible to do what they’re saying.
@madrabbit this has a different product name in the paper but yes 😭😭 "attention" and "meditation" lmfao what does it MEAN
@grimalkina I used that chip to make a silly toy, and as far as I could tell, attention is a 1-second average of some block of frequencies, and meditation is a similar average of others.
They weren’t diametrically opposed. I recall that reducing my physical activity and remaining still increased M, and it could be at the same time as a high level of A. Who knows what the signal processing was. But I bet it wasn’t sophisticated.