Recreation of Neurocognitive Data Collection
Author: Megan Taylor | Major: Mechanical Engineering | Semester: Spring 2025
Our research surrounds the phase of stakeholder needs identification in early engineering design work by analyzing a designing engineer’s brain activation. The aim of the procedure is to ask if engineers exhibit differences in generated stakeholder needs or brain activation when they are given a list of stakeholder personas. Stakeholder personas are short, fictional descriptions of people affected by the design problem. These data points lead us to the two main research questions: how does the use of personas impact stakeholder analysis in engineering design, and how does the use of personas during stakeholder analysis impact student perceptions on the value of stakeholder engagement? This research aims to fit into the larger picture of engineering education by illustrating the importance of connecting design work to the people it affects.
During the summer of 2024, I contacted Dr. Campbell about engineering design research. I had taken Mechanical Design and Manufacturing the spring of 2024 and was inspired by the less concrete, human factors of design work: a lack of rigidity so rare to engineering. In the spirit of rounding out my academic career, I aimed to dive deeper into these abstract elements of design. I learned that Dr. Campbell’s lab was currently working on obtaining a neuroimaging device called fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy), which allowed for truly interdisciplinary research. The non-invasive device measures brain activation by recording the oxygenation levels of blood traveling through the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobes, these areas being associated with decision making and executive function. This can give insight into what regions are active during certain phases of the procedure. Having leaned toward the medical field in the past, this element of neuroscience was exciting to me, especially when combined with engineering concepts.
The following fall semester consisted of fully fleshing out the study design and planning a pilot study to take place in the Spring. Yakhouba Ndiaye, a postdoctoral researcher, was the principal investigator for this study and had an outline of the research questions to cover. The general idea was to use Neurocognitive data to analyze student perceptions of stakeholder engagement during early design phases. During the spring, we developed the procedure to prove this most effectively. One of the greatest challenges was learning about IRB processes, including participant recruitment, and learning about the timeline for IRB approval. I learned to be patient, flexible, and grateful for starting my research so early in my undergraduate career. The pilot study took place at the end of the spring semester, aiming to finalize variables in the procedure before the main study in the Fall. However, due to some challenges with our initial pilot data collection, we needed to restart our pilot study. Despite this, working through the first pilot helped me identify many potential sources of error, such as background noise or variety in verbal instruction, that needed to be addressed for the second pilot to accurately determine the correct procedure for the main study.
My faculty mentor guided me through the entire processes, from teaching me how to run participants through the procedure to providing feedback on my honors college symposium poster. She also stepped up as principal investigator when Yakhoub took a position as a professor at another university. She fixed the issue of the pilot by offering to run another pilot during the summer, so I am on track to run the full study in the Fall.
The amount of time spent on the study design paid off in the end, as I placed third in the Honors College Symposium, without any data. Once the pilot and full study data is analyzed, I plan to attend the ICED (International Conference for Engineering Design) and the ASME (American Society for Mechanical Engineers) conference later this year.