Final (Almost) Stretch!

Hey readers :).

Whoa, I’ve just been informed that there’s less than a month until the Early Evaluation deadline, Jan. 1^st! Applying to Wellesley seems so long ago… and now that I’m putting off applying to graduate school for a year or two, I’m dislocated from the panicked masses of application deadlines. Well, the “masses” of applications at least. I had my interview with the University of Cambridge (the UK one) Thanksgiving morning, since I applied there for the Churchill Scholarship. I think it went well! Still, that’s nothing like the collection of apps you’re facing, or those that my pre-med friends finished, or those from my poor friends posting on Facebook (“2/12 grad school apps to go!” Oh god.) Best of luck figuring out where to apply, and we’d love to have you here. (Note: you learn a lot. Intellectually and spiritually and everything. Just FYI).

Wellesley just finished up our Thanksgiving Break, which was universally enjoyed according to a poll taken in my CS230 class this morning. I had a fantastic time—after my interview, I took the rest of Thursday and Friday off, and have sort of been slacking this weekend. (NO LONGER, AHHHH! I’ll get to that.) On Thursday I and a bunch of other swim-teamers were invited to Tiffany’s house, where we played a lot of word-games and demolished Mrs. Chen’s fantastic dinner. The next day a few of us completed the requisite post-Thanksgiving workout (I hear this is not a requisite thing elsewhere), consumed more food, and then watched a movie. I love watching movies with friends…

It was nice and quiet during the break—a large proportion of campus heads home, especially if they’re from the area. I went home my first year, but have been here all the rest of the years, staying over at Tiffany’s house. There’s so much that I’m thankful for, and having the Chens as an adopted family has been so, so special these last few years.

The rest of the time I’ve been catching up on sleep and going back to work. This year, when people groan that they don’t feel like doing work, I tell them the best solution: get panicked! It’s an extremely useful technique. All it takes is for you to look ahead like 7 days and see what’s due, and that’s usually plenty of motivation right there. In this case, school is over in 8 days. Next Tuesday is my last day of Wellesley classes, next Wednesday is my last day of MIT classes, and a lot of stuff is due on the last day of classes. I cannot believe that this semester is almost over… all I need to do is keep myself focused for that long plus a little extra :).

Major projects Monica’s been working on over the whole semester but need to be drafted/reworked/completed by next week:

9.66 Computational Cognitive Science:

(Well, first they assigned us another pset that’s due on Thursday… but apart from that :).)

Our final project for this class is to extend an existing Bayesian model. I’ve been working with Abbott et al. (2012)’s (… scientific citation notation! Man, I should excerpt some of my schoolwork for you guys.) model, which describes “focal” colors within color categories. Meaning that if you’re looking at a bunch of green colors (e.g. light green, dark green, forest green, neon green), there’s going to be a single green that you say is the “greenest.” That’s the most representative green, or the “focal” green. These authors say that if they give their model a bunch of greens, it’ll be able to pick out what most humans would say is the focal green. Pretty cool, right? Right now I’m working on replicating their work, but then I want to do their whole analysis in a different color space. There’s more than one color space, you ask? Oh yeah. There are lots of different ways to represent colors in a three-dimensional space, but I’m not going to get into it here…

(Prof. Hildreth at Wellesley has been helping me every week on this, and it will eventually get extended into the second half of my thesis :).)

Abbott, J.T., T. Regier, and T.L. Griffiths. Predicting focal colors with a rational model of representativenses. In Proceedings of the 34^th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.  2012.

9.71 Functional Basis of Human MRI:

(There’s the presentation I’m giving to the class tomorrow. (Quietly worried ah!) But apart from that…)

We’ve been working the whole semester on writing a novel research proposal. I’ve written novel research proposals before—basically, it involves going through all of the literature on a topic, finding something new that hasn’t been done yet, and then designing the experiment and writing it up. The thing is though, I’ve only written “novel” research proposals for stuff I’ve already been working on in Prof. Conway’s lab. So I’ll take the research I’m doing, go through a bit of the literature, and extend it a little bit to make the project original. (This is expected, not cheating.) I also haven’t gotten a lot of feedback when I’ve done this for scholarships in the past.

Not in this case! I’m writing a real novel research proposal here—no background knowledge on the topic, no existing research to build off of. And I’m lucky enough to be getting an enormous amount of feedback, as I’m graded on both my science (ahhhhhhh) and my writing (…oh dear.) I cannot tell you how wonderful taking this class with Prof. Kanwisher has been this semester. It’s been an incredible challenge, and I’m gearing up to finally take a good hard look at those drafts and rewrite.

Neuro 300: Capstone Neuroscience Class

Yay, I’ve arrived at my Wellesley classes! I have to write a novel research grant for this course. Note the “grant”, not “proposal.” Grants contain around 5-10 actual experiments, which means I’m doing a very short version of 5-10 different proposals in the grant. Currently my grant’s only about 15 pages though, and that’s how long my research proposal for 9.71 is. Someone’s got some work to do… :).

CS 230: Data Structures

Whew! We have a final project for this class: we’re working with partners to write a program to do whatever we want, as long as we include a certain number of data structures. Isabelle and I are designing an adventure game—the player has to make it through a maze with lots of different challenges. It’s called “Tower Dungeon Delirium.” I’ll just leave you with that to get the tone of our project.

 

Neuro 360: Thesis

I HAVE DATA!!! Sing the praises of everyone—I have data data data. I do need more data, and then I have to analyze this data. I’ve started analyzing it, just enough to realize how much more I need to analyze it. Still, last week I wrote a custom Matlab program to collect the data, and then I collected some data, so I am feeling good. All I need to do is make something to present at lab meeting on Friday. I’ve attached a description of the project that Prof. Conway and I wrote up last week if you’re interested :).

Neural correlates of the Bezold-Brücke color shift

Our ability to see and recognize objects seems effortless, yet depends upon an elaborate neural circuitry that is poorly understood. We use the macaque monkey as a model system to investigate the neural mechanisms of vision because the monkey has highly developed visual abilities like humans. In monkeys, we can collect responses from neurons throughout the visual-processing pathway, allowing us to establish neural correlates of perceptual phenomena. To understand whether the specific computations neurons are performing are important to perception, we compare neural responses to perceptual judgments. In this study I explored the neural correlates of the Bezold-Brücke hue shift, which describes the observations that the color associated with a particular wavelength changes depending on the intensity of the light. For example, lights that are blue at low luminance will appear greener at higher luminance. The Conway lab discovered clusters of neurons in macaque visual area V4 that show sharp color selectivity. In my project, I tested the extent to which these neurons shift their color preferences as the luminance of the stimuli is changed. To evaluate the extent to which these cells could support the Bezold- Brücke perceptual phenomenon, I measured human color judgments in a color-matching task, using the same stimuli that were used to test the color properties of the macaque neurons. If the color cells in V4 are responsible for color perception, I predict that the shifts in their color tuning should be tightly correlated with perceptual judgments.

Miscellaneous

And then I have tutoring with all of my lovely Neuro 100/200 students, and I want to attend some awesome lectures happening at MIT. One of the MIT lectures is about Theory of Mind (thinking about other peoples’ thinking), which I’m very excited about since both my novel research proposals for 9.71 and Neuro 300 are based on this topic. The other lecture is a computational cognitive science discussion on the role of intelligence, which is what I’m interested in studying in the future (well, not intelligence specifically, but human learning using computational methods.) Plus working out and all that other business like eating with friends occasionally, talking, transport and the inevitable lazy moments :).

So that’s my week, readers :). It amuses me how the “this is my life!” posts always end up rambling on for so long. I know that most of you guys don’t finish school for a few weeks yet, but wish me luck for the end of mine! This is a very atypical semester—usually there’s not too much due on the last day of class, and students have reading period to study before they take tests during finals period (which is two weeks from now). I just happen to have a bunch of projects instead of tests, that are mostly due next week instead of the week after.

Hope you had fabulous Thanksgivings, and best wishes for school and sundry!

Monica