Designing a study for identifying left hands circular motion preference with minimised cultural factors
Oh I love my brain. I nicknamed it 'Juicy' following a suggestion from the book 'Unstressable' for accommodating productive self-talk. "brain juice" is one of my favorite phrase hence the nickname and also it sounds like a praise so I think it feels respected when I call it that.
I'm reminded of how much I love it today in particular at when I was struggling with figuring out how organize and run a study to answer whether or not a left-hand usually does better drawing a circular/oval shape in writing in clockwise or counter clockwise motion with minimal cultural factors. There are 2 challenges with conducting this study
- It's not very easy to find lefties. Only ~10% of population are left-handed.
- Very few people lived through life without relevant cultural impacts. You have to pick and mix participants up to diversify the background
I spent so much time looking up on relevant research to find anything I can use as platform knowledge to conduct the study on top of it. I reached out as many people I know as I can to gather lefty participants while also looking into prolific.com which is an interesting time-effective option to connect with participants at scale. It felt like loaded troubles basically.
Then my Juicy uninvitedly (but very welcome by me), spit out an invaluable shower thought. I can just ask right-handers to use left hand (ie untrained with left anatomy) to draw circles of various sizes for me quickly. Bingo, the problems mostly solved. Thank you Juicy.