Psychology

Since this is what is on my mind, this is the topic I will be writing about today.

So yesterday, I had a meeting with a professor (actually, a lecturer- here, not all university teachers are called professors- that is a term used only for full professors. They do not have assistant or associate professors, but rather lecturers and readers, and junior and senior levels of both of those.) So the meeting lasted about an hour, during which we discussed project ideas and preparations that must be made depending on what I want to do for the rest of my life.

First of all, this lecturer gave me a very good tip about research in England. He said that many universities in the UK will hire RAs with masters degrees, and the standard is to allow them to take on a PhD course either during or after their RA work. This would a) give me excellent research experience after the degree and b) free PhD! So I'm really glad he brought that to my attention. Apparently the best way to look for RA work is to send informal e-mails to uni teachers who conduct research in your area of interest, close to the end of the masters program (obviously, so that you have more experience under your belt than the average BA.)

Second of all, during our talk, he told me I have a lot of very good ideas but my one problem (and I knew this coming in), is that I spend so much time coming up with fun studies, that I forget to come up with some practical reason for doing it-- in other words, I know what I want to do, but I haven't bothered to find out why I should do it. So that is my task for the week-- to come up with the research question to supplement my study.

The project is going to be great, by the way; it is everything I wanted it to be, going in. It will be on neglect, which is a neurological disorder where, after a person has a stroke, they are unable to pay attention to one half of space (usually the left). So if they were given a task where they had to draw a flower, they might draw half a flower. If someone points out the other half of the flower to the neglect patient, though, the patient will be able to copy it fully, suggesting that this disorder is of attention, not vision.

I wanted to do a project where I could 'induce' neglect in normal subjects by bogging their attention in some way. Wish granted! The lecturer suggested inducing neglect by attentional-overload-- giving subjects a busy scene to pick through. My idea was to present pictures for very short periods of time. Wish granted! Now, listen-- I came up with this project all on my own, and I am determined to do the majority of it myself, including learning how to program the visual computer tasks from scratch. This would involve coming into the lab on off-days to learn a program called MATLAB, which the lecturer said would be a valuable asset to my CV.

Once I learn how to use MATLAB, I will be able to design a picture task, where subjects will be asked to look at the center of a screen, and a picture of an animal (or something) will appear in either the right or left visual field. They will be asked to name several of these pictures, which will appear predominantly on one side of space to bias the attention of the subject. After a slew of animals (say) on the left, a single picture will appear in the center of the screen for a few milliseconds. This single picture will have something strange about it on either the right or left side; I suggested missing or upside-down numbers on a clockface. Then the subject will be asked if they saw anything wrong with the picture, which, if they have been used to looking at the left side of space, they may not catch on if the wacky clock numbers are on the right. Thus, induced neglect.

Part 2 of this study would manipulate attention in more ways that simply induced neglect. The lecturer suggested this part of the study after I told him I really liked a certain 'rotating barbell' experiment. This experiment involved neglect patients, where they were asked to copy a picture of a barbell that was shown on a computer screen. Obviously, they could only draw the right half of it. But, if patients were asked to look at the barbell as it revolved 180 degrees, the patient could follow the right half of the barbell until it had rotated into the left half of the screen, after which they could still draw that half of the barbell, even though it was now on the neglected side.

This phenomenon is explained by an interaction between dorsal and ventral streams, and spatial coordinate frameworks; now, you all know what spatial coordinate frames are, even if you don't realize it. It's just a fancy term for how we categorize visual information: one frame of reference is for objects on our body (egocentric, personal space), another is for objects around our body (egocentric, peripersonal space), and another is for objects that are far away (in allocentric, or extrapersonal space). Spatial coordinate planes can be in the left or ride side of space, high or low, etc. See, you all know what those are. And depending on where objects are, we will attend to them differently.

As for dorsal and ventral streams, these are also easy to explain: the dorsal stream is a pathway in the brain (that goes through the top half of the brain, thus 'dorsal' like the fin) that processes action, motion, or object location-- the 'where' pathway. The ventral stream is a pathway through the lower portion of the brain that processes object identification-- the 'what' pathway. I don't think it's really quite as simply as that, actually-- these pathways are more interconnected than some might think-- it's quite controversial. But this is the explanation for now, and perhaps we will learn something more about the nature of these pathways through my study!

Okay, so now you know about spatial coordinate frames and the dorsal and ventral pathways, we can get back to my study. Remember I told you about presenting lots of pictures on one side of space, then presenting a final wacko picture in the center of the screen? What the lecturer wants to do, is move the final wacko picture into different spatial coordinate frames. So the picture would first appear in the center of the screen, but then it might jump or slide to another side of space, (or grow or shrink?), after which subjects would be asked again whether there was something weird about that picture. In moving objects around the screen, and depending on whether or not subjects are able to perceive differences, we have utilized both the dorsal and ventral streams. Depending on peoples' responses to the pictures, we might be able to learn more about the interaction of the dorsal/ventral streams, and the dominance of certain spatial frames.

All right, not too complicated? Except now I can get back to the problem of finding a problem. Or, I guess, a question. What is the question we are asking here? Where is the gap in the literature, where my study will nicely slide? The answer, which is the question, is not yet answered, and that is where I will leave you for now. I must be off to find my question, which could take a billion hours, but I will find it-ho! I will find it!

Peace!