Colette Gazonas-Week 1-Shadlen Lab, Columbia University

This week I ventured into the city of New York to begin my lab at Columbia. Initially, I was planning on commuting from home to the lab each day, but shortly before my lab began I opted to stay in a hotel in the city instead. This made the commute a lot easier, taking only about 10-15 minutes by train to get to the lab. I was nervous about taking the subway by myself because I am not the best at navigating and feared that I would lose my way. However, the subway station is only one street away from where I'm staying and the lab is down the street from the stop I get off at, so it's a pretty direct and error-proof route. This eliminated a lot of the fear I had about my experience in the lab as I was relieved to find out that I would have no problem making it there and back each day by myself.

On my first day I arrived at Dr. Shadlen's lab at 10:00 a.m. The lab was on the 16th floor of a very large building, connecting to two others. The first thing I did was meet Yul, the grad student I am working with, and have a fairly long conversation with him about why I was interested in his work and what my goals were by the end of the summer. He then tested my familiarity with Matlab by giving me my first assignment which I was to complete by the end of the day in conjunction with reading another one of my P.I.'s publications. Thankfully, I was able to complete the assignment by the time we had our next meeting at 4:30 p.m. that day where he monitored my progress. During this time, he introduced me to his research assistant (RA), You-Nah, a junior at Columbia who is also in her beginning stages of learning Matlab. He suggested that we help each other out with the program and try to master it together. From that day on, I spent the rest of the week working with You-Nah to become more comfortable with the computer programming software as well as to run a set of paradigms. These paradigms were identical to those performed on the lab's subjects. Each paradigm increased in difficulty and running one after the other required great focus. Detecting eye and hand movement during a set timeframe, the tests grew tiring and tedious. As long as I stayed focused on the task ahead of me I was able to complete the paradigms successfully.

Each paradigm requires the subject to fixate on a dot in the center of the screen. A cluster of dots then appears for a short duration and directly following that stimulus the subject is asked to indicate whether or not the dots appeared to be moving right or left, and whether or not the majority of the dots were blue or yellow. Each subject is tested prior to running the paradigms to determine their individual sensitivity to color. Typically a person detects yellow at a luminance of about 160 cd/m2. Based on where a person's sensitivity lies in relation to this average, the luminance of the dots is adjusted so that one color does not appear more illuminated than the other. Because it has also been proven that when a person detects a stronger luminance of yellow they associate it with leftward movement and when they detect a stronger luminance of blue they associate it with rightward movement, the lab implements a personalized formula for each person to establish equiluminance, eliminating any bias that may affect their decision making.  

These paradigms are intended to provide evidence that will allow Yul to determine whether or not the brain is capable of integrating both color and motion at the same time. His hypothesis is that if the stimulus for color is more prominent than that of the stimulus for motion, the brain will first make a decision about the color of the moving dots shown on the screen, and vise versa.

On Thursday, the lab got together at 12:00 to watch the U.S. play Germany in the World Cup. They ordered pizza and I enjoyed having that time to decompress and regain some of my energy so that I could more efficiently run a series paradigms. This gathering was also important because this is the first time I met my P.I. Although, we only exchanged brief words, I appreciated the opportunity to introduce myself. During this time I was also able to get to know some of the other lab members better. There are about 20 people in my lab so it was difficult to get to know them all over the course of only one week, but this get-together definitely made it easier and allowed me to interact with them in a more relaxed environment.

Each Friday my lab holds a lab meeting in which each person in the lab gives an overview of the project they are working on, addresses any questions or concerns about their research, and shares any progress they have made. I really enjoyed getting to hear about each person's research because thus far I was only familiar with Yul's experiment. Because each person is already aware of what the other is studying, they did not spend much time discussing the specifics or goals of their work and rather cut right to the chase. As a result, I did not understand most of the unfamiliar terminology and was unable to fully comprehend a lot of the information that was thrown at me, but I was still able to appreciate their work, especially that of which I was able to better understand. I was fascinated by the vast range of research that is being conducted in the lab, spanning from neuroeconomics to optogenetics, and hope to solidify my understanding of each of these topics by the end of my six weeks here.

For homework, Yul gave me a Matlab assignment to complete over the weekend. I am to create a matrix of M by N, calculate the standard error of the mean for each column, and make an error bar of the data. Furthermore, I was instructed to make a logistic curve which measures the probability of choosing the color blue as opposed to yellow based on logit. I was given 7 values for the logit (-1.5, -1, -.5,...,1.5) in which I am to generate 20 data points for each and plot it as a logistic curve. Then I will plot the theoretical curve as one smooth line and compare the simulated points to that of the ideal points on the curve. Although this task is quite challenging, I hope that by using a few references and committing myself to completing this assignment, I will be able to do so successfully.