For the rest of Monday and all of Tuesday, I looked through the Internet researching on differnet ways to plot graphs using Python as well as listening to some of the lectures on Coursera.
On Wednesday morning, I was able to graph a boxplot of the average response time for each syllable group with error bars. At noon, I attended the weekly reading group for undergraduates and high school students. Due to low attendence (there were only 3 students including me), Sara, the speaker, and the three of us had informal discussions on the papers she sent out the week before. The papers she assigned to us were ones that were getting media attention this summer. There were three papers: one about dogs, one about TV and one about food. The paper about dogs was about an ongoing experiment where the researchers were able to train some dogs to go into the fMRI machine for brain scans. A striking finding in the experiment was that the caudate nucleus in dogs was very similar in function and structure to the one in humans. In humans, the caudate plays a key role in anticipation of things that we enjoy or desire. In dogs, according to the experiment, the caudate activation was increased in response to hand signals indicating food and smell of familiar people. The second article was about TV, where researchers used EEG and later fMRI to observe the neural response to TV shows and Superbowl commercials. According to the paper, the researchers were able to use their subjects' neural response to predict the response of mass audience. They used Twitter activity and Nielson ratings to measure the response of the general audience. The last article was about food cravings. It talked about how some people have more trouble resisting food desires due to low activation in the Inferior Frontal Gyrus, mostly in charge of self-control. After the discussion, we were supposed to go to the fMRI room for fMRI demonstration, but the other two students who were there had other committments, so the demonstration was postponed.
On Thursday, I was able to plot scatter plot and best line of fit using the out-of-scanner behavioral data that Zhenghan sent me to see the relationship between average duration and phonetic abilities.
On Friday, I looked through the links that Zhenghan had sent the previous day to help me with data analysis, and attended the undergraduates' poster session. Some of them were almost impossible for me to understand with my background, but many of them were very interesting. For example, one of the presenter's research was similar to the poster I made for the spring poster session. She was looking to isolate a part of the brain that is activated when presented a familiar word. When she was pointing at the figures showing the areas that were shown to activate when the subjects' saw a familar word and I pointed out that the area was left inferior prefrontal cortex near Broca's area (the area of the brain which was the main focus of my proposal and poster), she was surprised by my observation and was even more stunned when I told her that I was only a high school student with almost no background in Neuroscience. I stayed for the full two hours had was able to have chats with almost all of the presenters.
I have also scheduled a meeting on Monday with Zhenghan to discussd further analysis of the data.
Picture of the poster session:
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