Some background info:
Several months ago, I was told about a 9-week research program that would be up at Colorado State University in the summer. The program would be geared toward cognition and neuroscience. Naturally, I became interested immediately because those are “my things” in terms of my major interests in psychology, particularly the aspect of research in general. I read about the program and decided to apply with the help of a few of the professors at Metro. Much to my delight, I was one of 12 people to be accepted into the program (out of ~170 applicants).
Eventually, June rolled around. After the 1.5 hour journey from 
As it turns out, I don’t have a roommate. I got lucky. Out of the 12 people in the program, 11 are female, meaning 10 of those people got paired up and have to share a room, and I’m apparently #11. To make matters more interesting, I’m one of only two people who is doing a study on perception (everyone else is doing stuff on cognition), and I’m on the 3rd floor whereas everyone aside from two others are on the 2nd floor. All of that kinda makes me feel a little secluded, but most of you probably know that I’m a pretty solitary person in general, so I don’t mind ;o)
My neighbors, who I met on Saturday, are extremely nice which is good because I’ll be sharing a bathroom with them and most likely be interacting with them frequently because we’re the only REU mind and brain peeps on the 3rd floor. I met the rest of the people at a BBQ on Sunday; that was a bit awkward because, as you know, I’m not very talkative around people I don’t know, especially considering that psych people tend to be more outgoing than folks involved in other sciences (recall that I went to Mines for a semester, so I can vouch for this).
Anyway. Today was orientation, and we received the basic information about how the program will unfold – in addition to conducting and analyzing our own study, we are required to complete a general course on cognition, perception and neuroscience. It should be pretty straightforward for me because I’ve taken courses on all of those areas before. There will also be weekly seminars and workshops that will help us perform our research, give us an idea of research methods we won’t be able to use this summer (such as EEGs), and provide tips for applying to graduate schools.
As far as I know, everyone who is doing work in cognition has some flexibility in terms of what they want to do their study on. Most people seem to be interested in memory, although at least one person is planning on doing work with language acquisition. Unfortunately for me, however, I was unable to choose what to do because my mentor already has the study set up, essentially, and due to the nature of perception research, we need to get started ASAP.
Perception research is interesting because many studies include only a handful of participants, but each participant must be involved in the study for several hours, oftentimes 10 hours or more. Studies in the field of cognition usually have 50+ participants who are only required to give an hour or so of their time for data collection.
The four participants in our study are my CSU mentor (Vicki), a graduate student (Lucinda), another undergraduate student (Armando), and...me. That’s right, we're participants in our own study! :oP I’m excited for this because, frankly, I’m a nerd who really enjoys this sort of thing, and it also means I don’t have to use any of my grant money to pay participants.
The research I will be working on involves color perception in the peripheral visual field. We’re going to consider how stimulus size, intensity and hue (and where the stimulus is presented on the retina) impact how the stimulus is actually perceived by the participant. The stimuli are circles of light presented to one eye via an interesting machine called a Maxwellian-view system.
I don’t know the ins and outs of the machine yet, but I will be trained to use it tomorrow. Today I got my color vision analyzed – I had to arrange several series of color chips in what I perceived to be the proper order to ensure that I am a normal trichromat. Then, I had to adjust a stimulus several times to where it was matching another in brightness. I’m not sure what kind of information was gathered from that nor how it will be used in our study, but I’m sure I will find out tomorrow.
Perhaps the most frustrating and interesting part of my day today was calibrating the Maxwellian apparatus to my eye. Things were substantially more irritating than usual because I have glasses with a strong prescription and therefore had to wear them while wearing an eyepatch over my left eye. But before even being able to do the calibration, I had to make myself a bite-bar, which is a horseshoe-shaped piece of metal sticking out perpendicularly from the top of a metal rod. I had to make a wax impression of my teeth over the horseshoe-shaped part because this is the part I must keep my mouth on to steady my head in order to view the stimuli appropriately. Ain’t life grand?
The bite-bar can be screwed into part of the table in front of the machine. The goal is to ensure that the entire stimulus fits directly in front of your pupil, and getting it exactly right is more tedious than it seems (supposedly it can take over 2 hours for some people, but it only took me about a half hour. I’m still not sure if I did it exactly right, though, because there’s essentially no comparison to go by!). After that, I got to see how the actual stimuli will be presented during the study, then I chatted some more with Vicki and Armando.
Tomorrow I will serve as the pilot participant to get Armando comfortable with running the machine. This is unfortunate for me because when I run it I will be collecting actual data, meaning I have less screw-up leeway ;oP We’ll see how that goes.
I’ll work on getting more pictures of where I’ll be working (and what I’ll be working with) soon, but I’m not sure if I can take photos with the flash on in the vision testing and lab rooms due to the sensitivity of the equipment. In the meantime, here are some random pictures of the campus:
(More here)
Lastly, here's my address:
Katie Youngpeter
343 Parmelee Hall
Ft. Collins, CO 80521
1 comment:
Yeah katie, sounds really awesome. Keep writing.
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