Approved!

The amendment has finally been approved! It took longer than we expected so we had to cancel the first two days of data collection but I finally got the opportunity to collect data for the first time on Thursday. 

The process was surprisingly easier and more streamlined than expected. It takes about no more than a minute to turn on the computer and set up the reverse digit span task. All it takes is adding the task to the launch chain and typing in ACPr with the participants number. ACPr stands for acute pre because we are looking at the acute effects of exercise. For the post task we would type in ACPo to distinguish the pre and post data sets. Before I gave them the task to do, we told the participants about the change in the consent forms and had them sign the new edits. Then we had them complete the reverse digit span task. They seemed to do very well and that is most likely due to them having taken the task many times last semester. 

Once they were done, they went upstairs for the exercise session. The exercise session actually ended up being 40 minutes instead of 60 like we previously thought. Once they were done, they came back and took the task one more time. 

While I can't say anything conclusively, the participants seemed to finish the task somewhat quicker than before which ties into previous findings of other studies. The other similar studies that I have recently read about all found that the reaction time to other working memory tasks (such as the Stenberg working memory task) decreased significantly. One of the studies found a slight significant decrease in accuracy of the tasks. It will be important to keep these findings in mind while analyzing the data at the end of the data collection because I originally planned on just looking at accuracy; however, there could be considerable improvements in speed and not just accuracy. 

Our data collection was cancelled on Sunday so I only have this Tuesday and Thursday to collect data before I will have it all and be ready to analyze. I look forward to continuing my work on my final presentation which I recently started and being ready to adding my results to it by the end of next week.