Cognitive Science

I am doing summer research at both the Duke University Canine Cognition Center and the Duke University Lemur Center. Both centers take a non-invasive approach to research in order to determine cognitive abilities of both dogs and lemurs. Basically, we interact with the lemurs and dogs rather than anesthetize them to measure chemical levels, etc.

In the morning, I head over the lemur center to work on a project aimed at determining how various species of lemurs search for food. Basically, do lemurs remember where food is simply because they have “muscle memory” or do they truly remember where in space their food is? We record each session on a video camera and data sheet, and I code the videos for which side the lemur chooses food from and how long it takes.

In the afternoon, I go to the Canine Cognition Center. At the center, there are three experiments currently going on: 1) Trust; 2) Predictions; 3) Inhibitory Control. The Trust study seeks to determine if dogs have an emotional connection with humans. It uses an exposure period, introductory period, and finally a test period to attempt to determine this potential emotional connection. Previous studies show that dogs do have a physical connection with humans (they can follow human pointing cues), so do they also connect with us on an emotional level? For the sake of brevity, I will not explain with Predictions and Inhibitory Control tests, but feel free to email me if you are interested at dambro@oxy.edu.

Advice for students who are thinking of doing research: Get out there and take charge! You can’t wait for research opportunities to just fall into your lap. I saw the head of the Canine Cognition Center on t.v. and emailed him. When you show that kind of initiative, the lab knows you want to be there and that you will do anything to get there. Most importantly, you have to choose something you are passionate about. That way you won’t be bored doing your internship or research, and when you want to go to grad school it’ll look great on your application.

I am doing research at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis with the Cognitive and Behavioral sciences REU program. There are 12 students total in the program and we all work with a specific mentor in his or her lab. I work in Yuhong Jiang’s Attention, Memory, and Cognition lab in the psychology department. So far with the program I have attended seminars with speakers from all over the cognitive science department, including faculty from auditory perception, genetics, neuroscience,and translational research. We have gone on tours of many different labs from the new cutting edge MRI/fMRI facility to an awesome car simulator lab, as well as some smaller scale child development labs. We also attend regular seminars on research ethics, as well as writing workshops to help improve our scientific writing. On a day-to-day basis, I work in the lab with Dr. Jiang and her post doctorate assistants. Sometimes I read articlesabout their research, run participants for experiments, or get private tutoring sessions from Dr. Jiang on relevant cognitive science topics. I even had the opportunity to be a subject in her fMRI screening experiment; it was really exciting to see the experiment from both ways, as a researchers and as a participant! I am also working on a project of my own that I will present at the end of my 10-week program. My project is about the Numerical Distance Effect, a known effect that proposes that as the numerical distance between two numbers increases, their values are easier to distinguish. For this project, I have programmed my own MATLAB experiment, run subjects, gathered and analyzed data, reviewed the research literature, and compiled a report discussing the history, my experiments, my findings, and the neural correlates involved in this phenomenon and number processing in general. It is awesome to be in an academic environment this summer surrounded by faculty and students who share my interests. I am learning so much from the program and I can’t wait to come back to Occidental with my newly acquired knowledge and skills.

My prior research has explored which specific neurological areas are activated when people calculate how much they would be willing to pay for various household items.   Interestingly enough, these same neurological areas are activated during certain styles of meditation.  The shared activity of these specific neurological regions may indicate a relationship between meditation and maximum dollar willingness to pay, or WTP.   To explore this potential relationship, my research investigates whether practicing meditation before completing valuation calculations might influence a subject’s subsequent WTP responses.

To students considering summer research in the future,  I recommend creating a detailed project timeline to guide the research process.   Because drawing solid conclusions and preparing a clear presentation are rigorous and time consuming tasks, leaving ample time after data collection is necessary in order to complete both effectively.

Both this summer and last summer, I conducted research at Oxy with faculty in the cognitive science and psychology departments.  Last summer, I worked with Dr. Carmel A. Levitan, in conjunction with Dr. Shinsuke Shimojo of the Shimojo Psychophysics Laboratory at Caltech, on a project investigating multisensory perception.  To create our perceptions of the world around us, our brains must integrate incoming information from the different sensory systems. Although studies have found many instances of one sensory modality influencing the perception of another during this process of integration, it remains unclear whether or not psychophysical adaptation effects transfer from one sense to another. Our study specifically examined the possibility of crossmodal transfer of temporal rate adaptation from vision to audition and from audition to vision.  During the week, my mentor and I would go to Caltech to conduct the experiment on a piece of equipment there called the “hoop,” a semi-elliptical metal frame with panels that allowed us to control the presentation of auditory and visual stimuli. To use the hoop, I learned to program in MATLAB, which is a great skill to have.  I really enjoyed being able to code our experiment for the hoop; it taught me that coding can be a lot of fun, and allowed me to be very involved in and have input in actually designing the study. Thus, it was especially exciting when we got the final version working. The results of our study were also exciting, and we hope to get a paper out of it, as well as extend the study in other directions. In addition, my mentor and I attended some of the lab meetings at Dr. Shimojo’s lab.  I liked hearing about what others in the lab were working on (for instance, at the graduate level) and also to see how the meetings worked, with everyone giving feedback and ideas on each other’s projects. (I even got to participate in some of their studies later on, which were really interesting!) The lab environment was very friendly, and it was great to be able to work there.  Overall, I gained a lot of knowledge on crossmodal findings in the field of psychophysics, in an involving, hands-on way.

This summer, I worked in the Thinking and Reasoning Lab under Dr. Andrew Shtulman, who studies concept acquisition and conceptual change.  The project I worked on was a six-part study designed to assess people’s perceptions of the natural world.  More specifically, we studied misperceptions of nature as a possible source of misunderstandings about the theory of evolution by natural selection – a theory that is extremely important to the biological sciences, yet widely misunderstood.  We examined students’ perceptions by asking them to rate how frequently they thought cooperative and competitive animal behaviors occur in nature, as well as studied the malleability of their perceptions by showing them clips of such behaviors from nature documentaries (to test for priming effects). We also measured their understanding of key evolutionary phenomena and looked for correlations between evolution understanding and perceptions of the different types of behaviors.  It was a great experience to be able to prepare the different parts of this experiment, see it all come together, and finally run all the participants.  The findings from this study were also exciting, as we found many of the effects that we predicted! From working on this study, I learned so much about the theories and concepts surrounding misconceptions of evolution, and I believe that I have gained a much deeper understanding of evolution myself. Aside from focusing on the study, I attended a weekly reading group with my mentor and the other members of the lab, where we got to discuss a lot of interesting ideas related to our various interconnected projects.  It was really nice to work in a lab alongside other undergraduate, summer researchers interested in the same topics as I am.

Between these two research projects, I gained valuable experience in skills such as programming, recruiting and running human participants, collecting pilot data, coding and analyzing data, finding good stimuli to use, putting together experiments and problem-solving related to experiment design, learning to use new software (MediaLab), and reviewing the existing literature on a research topic.  In addition, I gave a poster presentation at the end of the first summer (that I was able to bring to SCCUR), and I wrote a paper and gave a talk on my project this summer.  The two presentations were challenging, but valuable, practice that I am thankful for.  The paper also helped me connect and solidify everything I learned, as well as document what I did this summer.