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What is your PhD researching? 

I am researching how design elements of the pokies may contribute to harmful gambling behaviour. Broadly, I also have an interest in how cognitive and behavioural sciences can inform public policy to improve quality of life or reduce harm.

For the most part my PhD focusses on a single aspect of Pokie machine design that researchers have called ‘losses disguised as wins’. These events occur when a machine returns a small payout that is less than the original bet. Financially speaking, these events are actually a loss, but the machines celebrate these events just like wins (i.e., with sounds and lights). So it’s likely that these events might make gambling feel more rewarding than it is financially.

So we're looking at that in a few different ways. Firstly we are running an EEG study, where we record a signal that can be used to index the brain's response to positive and negative outcomes. We’re analysing whether we're processing these losses more like wins rather than like losses. We're also doing an eye tracking study, where we teach some players spot whether a win is genuine or a loss disguised as win. We can then measure their eye-movements to check whether they engage with the visual feedback on the machine to check that they are doing the calculation necessary to tell the difference. When we make small mental calculations the pupil dilates, so we can also use pupil size to check that a calculation is taking place.

The last component of my PhD is a social attitudes survey. We want to know what happens when we tell the general public about about these particular pokies features, whether that changes their disposition towards harm minimisation policy in the sector, or whether it increases or decreases stigma towards people who engage in pokies gambling.

Can you tell me more about the tools you are using in your research?  

I have been putting my survey together using Qualtrics, which is an easy web based survey design platform. I plan to do all my analyses using R & R Studio, specifically the Tidy Verse package, which I've been learning with ResPlat. After getting involved with ResPlat I’m pretty comfortable cleaning data and using Tidy Verse in R to set everything up nicely, but I haven't done any of my analyses yet because I'm still collecting data!

For the EEG data,. there's an open source MATLAB package called EEG Lab and ERP Lab which is used to analyse EEG data. I'll also be using Psych toolbox, which is another toolbox written for MATLAB to present stimuli to participants, so I'm rapidly trying to learn MATLAB this year!!

Would you recommend our services to other Graduate Researchers?  Absolutely, I think that the ResPlat service is great. There are two things that you guys do really well. The first is, I think, often, at least the first challenge when you want to learn a new tool, is you don't know where to start. In response to that your introductory courses are great as they can get you up to speed with the basic operations & fundamentals of the tool for research. If you were to try to teach yourself that alone on the internet, although resources are getting better, you don't know what to search for and you don't know what's important to learn first. With the courses you put training wheels on and it allows you to gain all the basic knowledge you need to start answering your own questions. 

Another thing you guys do really well is build a community of researchers. I like learning socially and I find that a good test of your knowledge is to try explain it to someone else and help them troubleshoot. Almost immediately after finishing the Introduction to R workshop, I started coming along and helping out. Through this you become connected with other researchers who are learning, so you can problem solve together, which also helps solidify a lot of the knowledge and that builds the research community too. 

 Dan Myles is a 2nd year PhD candidate at Monash University, which includes a supervisor from Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He also works as a Research Assistant at the Decision Science Hub at the University of Melbourne. 

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