I'm a convert...
Continuing my latest bandwagoning on the data train, using a method I learned in class which has turned out to be insanely applicable to everything I'm interested in (Pivot Tables in Excel are amazing), I did some organizing and preliminary analysis of my data for my reaction time experiment. Preliminary analysis is giving me the following bar plot:
Which, seeing that nice curve - is intensely gratifying. Coming from a totally dyed-in-the-wool theoretician for much of my career, I'm slowly beginning to experience the rewarding feeling of doing experiments: it's a really long and involved process to read the background lit on a domain of study, find a research question, design an experiment addressing that question, recruit participants, run the experiment on humans, get a bunch of data, analyze it, and get some awesome plots that look exactly how you want it to. I'm so excited -- not just for the fact that this means the design of the experiment was sound and I can safely proceed to Experiment 2, and finish this dang paper, but also for the fact that I guess this means I can officially add "experimental methods" to my skillset.