Term 2, Week 2

I just re-read my post from last week and have gotten some things accomplished in the meantime. First of all, let me congratulate myself by announcing that I scored 90% on both essays from last term. Seeing as 70% begins the mark of "distinction" in the UK, you can see that I basically have an A++. It is kind of a big deal. Is the course head an easy grader? The answer is "no"-- someone on my course scored a 58, and I have it on good authority that three scored 62s. The Office Gossip, a personal friend of mine, claims that the same grader put an overachieving undergrad to tears when she received her first score in the 60s from him. I worked exceptionally hard on these papers, so I feel my grades were well-deserved.

20 articles and 1700 words later, and I am almost done with the hallucination section of my literature review. I decided to reformat it to follow this general outline:
INTRODUCTION
More than ten years after Behrmann (2000), what do we now know about the relationship between imagery and perception?
What is imagery according to information processing?
What is perception according to information processing?
Summary of current theories

MEASURING IMAGERY
Various self-report and behavioral measures can be implemented to assess imagery vividness and its relationship to visual perception.

NORMATIVE STUDIES
fMRI, behavioral. Current theories. Address dreaming, imagery and perception.

NEURAL BASES OF IMAGERY IN NORMALS
Ganis, Thompson, Kosslyn, 2004-- brain areas underlying visual mental imagery
Neural evidence that vivid imagery can lead to false remembering (Gonsalves et al 2004)
etc.

HALLUCINATIONS AND IMAGERY (this is the section I've almost finished with)
Early Models
Reality Discrimination
Perception and Attention Deficit (PAD) Model
Neural Bases of Hallucinations

SCHIZOPHRENIA AND IMAGERY
Although hallucinations are more likely attributed to reality discrimination errors rather than vividness of mental imagery, there is some evidence that vivid imagery is a characteristic of the schizophrenic spectrum in general, regardless of hallucinatory experience (Oertel et al., 2009; Sack, Van de Ven, Etschenberg, Schatz, & Linden, 2005).
Also: Bell and Halligan (2010) and Oertel and Linden (2010)

Aleman, de Haan, and Kahn (2005)—object vs spatial visual imagery in schizophrenia
Currie, 2000—imagination, delusions, hallucinations


fMRI
Onitsuka, 2007—occipital lobe gray matter

NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES
Representational neglect and cortical blindness

CONCLUSIONS
What we know now we didn't know 10 years ago, what we still have left to know, future study ideas

Yes, that is my basic outline for now, but I'm sure it will change. My weekend goal? To read at least 10 articles on imagery in normals, 10 more over the early part of next week, and have the normal imagery part of my review written by next Thursday-- you hold me to that, readers!

And as for the "random experiment" we have to do, I had to change that because the head of the course (from this point forward shortened to HOC) will not let me use his fancy eyetracking machine. So I changed my study to this:

Recruit 50 people. Have them all take various surveys on mental imagery and schizotypy, and perhaps a behavioral measure or two. Each participant will look at a computer screen as a sequence of familiar objects are either represented as words, pictures, or videos-- for example, I could present the word DOG on the screen, or show a picture of a dog, or a short (2-3 second) video clip of a dog. Any tangible object could be represented in one of these three ways-- food, transportation, animals, etc. At the end of the sequence, I will ask the question: "Was the target _______ a word, picture, or video?"

Then, I will take the 10 highest and lowest scorers on the imagery/schizotypy measures, and see if there is a significant difference in discrimination between those types of targets.

Previous studies have found that people with shizotypal/vivid imagery characteristics will more likely confuse words with pictures. Nobody has yet looked at video, and since video is more realistic, will they still show discrimination errors?

This study can be done on any computer using a simple programming program (ha) called e-prime-- which, gets this-- writes the code FOR YOU. Thank the lord, I think e-prime will be my new best friend.

Also, I talked to the HOC over the week, and he helped me to compartmentalize (sort of) the work that has to go into coming up with a 3-year plan for the mock-studentship proposal. I'm going to start with replicating a part of someone else's study (the study I mentioned in the last post where normal relatives of schizophrenics were found to have higher mental imagery than people who were not related to schizophrenics, suggesting a genetic component to imagery ability). I will start with relatives of schizophrenics, schizotypal normals, and control normals-- no patients, no NHS approval needed, no problem. I will work up from there to patient studies. fMRI may currently be out of the question for a PhD proposal.

Let's see, what else...

Oh yes-- my BPS poster. Well, I have the results complete, a couple sentences for conclusion-- may need to flesh that out a bit more, but not REALLY necessary since it's a poster. Have a short intro on linguistics terminology used in the poster, and a sentence or two on the "phonological mediation" debate. As follows:


Linguistic Terminology 101
Lesson
Phonology: language sounds
Orthography: language meanings
Lexicon: vocabulary
Input: Reading or listening
Output: Writing or speaking

Test
If you want to read a word aloud:
First, translate the written lexical input into a phonological representation, then, access the orthographic representation of the word, and finally, generate phonological output.
(This is the traditional theory of written language processing.)

The Phonological Mediation Debate
Can you access the meaning of a word without first sounding it out in your head?
This would appear to be a simple question, but it is one that has haunted language scientists for decades.

So, I don't have much, but it's a start!

Oh, and I almost forgot the most important thing...

I ran my pilot this week, and just finished plotting the data today! It felt so good to generate all that data, and then watch it turn into a graph before my very eyes. What is the verdict? The task seems to be too hard. I made it harder because I myself was performing at ceiling in the easier task, but perhaps I am just abnormally good at this task.

Average performance didn't sink below a rate of 50% correct, but it didn't come close to 90% either, even in the easiest condition. We found the correct curve in the data, just shifted down a few percentiles. We did not find any hemispheric differences, which may be because the task was so hard, we hit a floor effect. Tomorrow we will meet to discuss changing the task and running a few more participants, and hopefully we will get the right effect next time. But now I am PUMPED to get this thing going-- there is so much I can do with it!

Something I didn't think about until recently, was the raging debate (I do love scientific debates) about how we process features. There are several different theories on this subject, and I can research all of them for my thesis, and compare the results of my study to them and see which one looks best. Why am I so giddy about finding out hemispheric differences in conjunction tasks? I have been getting more and more enthusiastic about my thesis ever since that low point in December when I desperately wanted to change it. But now I'm working on it again, I don't have time to re-think the whole thing, and I am such a dork, the thought of finding something in this experiment thrills me.

And I am already looking at journals in which to publish! Cognitive Neuropsychology doesn't have a very large impact factor (it is not heavily cited), so that one might be possible to get into. The larger the impact factor, the tougher the review process, the tougher it is to get a publication. Since this would probably be my first publication, I will take ANYTHING. Publication! That word thrills me too.

And I think my adviser is just as excited as I am to see what happens. I feel so proud of myself for coming up with such an amazing study all on my own. Well, my adviser did help a LOT with the details, such as some of the conditions for the experimental design and programming the thing, but the theory is all my own. Mine! MINE.

Today in class, we learned about how in the UK now, every experiment has to have a "Pathway to impact", which is, socio-economical significance. We each had to give a short summary of how our research impacts society. I prided myself in first addressing how I think a study shouldn't NEED a socio-economic impact-- that the most important thing in the world is to find out how the brain works.

I'm sure some will agree with me on that point. I feel quite strongly about it and was not ashamed to express that opinion before I went on to say how my research could potentially be beneficial in understanding/rehabilitating attention disorders. Kevin pointed out that attention research is very beneficial for the military, because pilots, for example, have to attend to many things at once and make split-second decisions that could determine the lives and deaths of everyone, etc.

At any rate, I don't CARE what my research is used for. I couldn't care LESS. Do what thou will with the results of my attentional blink task. I just want to know how the brain works. And that's that.

Let's change topics, now-- enough with the academic talk! I've been doing this stuff since 10AM this morning and I'm done thinking about it for tonight.

I am doing semi-successfully in my after-Christmas diet-- meaning, I am cutting down on junk food/candy/cookies/etc. Today I had a few pieces of chocolate (dark) but I'll make the excuse that I just needed to balance out the iron in my blood. ;) Other than that, I have been eating pretty healthily the past couple of weeks-- however, I am having trouble with carb addiction. I am very sensitive to carbohydrates-- not that they irritate my skin/stomach/etc like some people, but once I start I just can't stop. I know I can't eat just a small bowl of cereal, or one slice of toast.

Today I munched 8 slices of bread total. 2 as toast for breakfast, 4 as sandwiches for lunch and dinner, and two with nutella as dessert. However, I have been doing VERY well eating my five-a-day fruits and veggies, and then some! This morning, I had a bowl of yogurt and mixed fruit, made up of banana, apple, and plum. This afternoon, I had some grapes, and another banana, apple, and plum. My sandwiches consisted of baby spinach and homemade salsa-- yes, you heard me-- I MADE salsa!

Here's the recipe:
1 can black beans
1 can sweet corn
1 red pepper
1 green pepper
4 tomatoes
1 chili pepper
1/4 cup chopped scallions
1 clove garlic
3 tbsp lime juice
1 tbsp cumin
fresh parsley

That makes a whole shitload of delicious salsa. I made it on Tuesday and ate salsa burritos til I got sick of them, then I put the salsa on my sandwiches with spinach and light cheese. So with all those veggies, combined with all that fruit, I'm way over my five-a-day, everyday! So generally I consider myself to be a healthy eater... with a carb addiction.

But I think running 3 hours a week balances out my carb overloads, so I should be good.

And speaking of which, I am running tomorrow morning-- this time, with a friend! Yippee, hooray. That friend is a strange fellow from my alma mater, named William-- and I know you all love my character profiles, and this person definitely calls for one, so here it is:

William is a young chap of 19 or 20, with the eccentric air of a systematic windmill-chaser. Wrapped in a rice paper layer of rationality, he at one moment ponders the future of American education, the next you can imagine he is thinking to a mountain "Wilt thou yet be conquered?", and in no less flowery language. The air of having been homeschooled throughout most of his childhood lingers about him like a somewhat socially-awkward, independent, yet approachable, aura. He is fond of picking fights with people's aunts over the status of the moon, brings culinary utensils into the wildnerness, and mysteriously adopted an English accent about two years ago. He is what I deem the psychologically-typical equivalent to my old friend, the "Running Man", and is no less of a curiosity. If he were an animal, he'd be a giraffe.

That is all.