Okay, I know three posts in two days is a little excessive, but stuff has happened so I have to write this!
So last night, having finished that rationale in about 2 hours, I walked up and down Clarendon Park Road, checking in every grocery store and off-license (that's liquor store) I could find for that coveted pumpkin or orange spice/liquer/flavoring syrup for the party and Jana's house. And what do you know? Every place thinks I'm crazy. Or can't understand my accent, I don't know which. "Orange... liquer? Pumpkin... spice?" (shakes head with fearful look in eye) "No... we don't have that..." Oh well, so we just had our good ol' fashioned hot buttered rum with Bailey's, and everything turned out peachy.
I was also going up and down the road looking for a nice pizza joint, but finding they were all incredibly expensive I foraged the grocery store for a ready-made plain pizza and I just loaded it with fresh veggies-- UM-- best idea of my life! It cost a grand total of 2pounds 40p and it lasted me through three meals. So I'm going to stock up on the ready-made pizza pie and veggies galore and have myself some delicious and cheap dinners until I get sick of em!
We had a good turnout with the trick-or-treaters last night. Jana and Sonja put up decorations to flag the kids down and we had a couple of good crowds come by. Jana dressed up as Hermione again, filled a bowl with chocolate and waited for the monsters to flock. And, there was enough left over for me to have about half the bowl! Yippee! So that was Hallowe'en weekend, and it was all amazing fun.
Today, it was back to work, and I ran the control condition for my reading study. At first I thought it wasn't necessary-- I thought, of course college students would be able to score 100% on a reading test that was at about a 3rd grade level, right? Um... let me put it this way. I will never underestimate the stupidity of undergraduates again. You might be thinking what Becky pointed out when I told her the news: "Maybe the students were just hurrying through the experiment, not really reading the passages?" Nope. Every other participant was reading the whole thing out loud, and it didn't help their scores one bit.
Well, it has only been one day. Maybe it was just a reject batch, and the rest will score in the above-retarded range. I'll tell you at the end of the week!
Oo, also! I settled at last on a critical literature review topic: The relationship between visual imagery and perception!
There has been much debate, you see, whether people use the same neural mechanisms for visual imagery and actual vision vision, a.k.a. visual perception. I came across a wicked discussion article on the topic, but it was only four and a half pages long and was written 10 years ago, and the author's conclusion was that both overlap to a certain neural degree, but the extent is uncertain, and specific brain regions have not been agreed upon. I figured-- I should see if any discoveries have been made since then, and I can expand greatly on the relevant literature.
What was cool about the article was that the author drew from neuropsychological evidence for parts of her argument, and she looked at articles that had studied imaginal neglect and visual imagery in cortical blindness (where the brain regions for visual perception had been completely wiped out). These are all really cool things, but it is also interesting to note that the author is not only the same person who contributed to my favorite "rotating barbell" experiment which jump-started my interest in neglect, but she is also one professor I targeted to be my adviser for a PhD program at Carnegie Mellon University-- I was, of course, rejected.
Nevertheless, I have to say that by the time I'm finished, she will be begging me to be her grad student!
Hell yeah!
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