Prior to coming to the lab, I was already contacted by my assigned graduate students, whose projects I will be assisting this summer. I was paired with two: Mika and Sophie. They both got in touch with me right away and arranged meetings with me to brief over their projects. With Mika, I will be aiding her further research on children’s representation of the self through social interactions. My project specifically addresses how long a preschooler will persist on a task that they keep failing at given that preschoolers are sensitive to an audience watching them perform the task. As for Sophie, she deliberately withheld specific details about her project to me because I will be coding videos that she recorded during experimental sessions with the children, and therefore it is important that I remain indifferent.
On orientation, I met with the 9 other research assistants that volunteered like I did for the summer. We went around introducing ourselves and they all audibly gasped when I said I was still in high school. Grace, our lab manager, came to greet us and showed us a presentation on important information for the lab. We then introduced ourselves again to Grace, who insisted we mention what “ordinary superpower” we’d want as an icebreaker. I said, “I want to wake up without ever getting tired,” and the girl next to me said, “I want to be able to absorb 3 times the amount of materials when I study within the same period of time.” Wow. During this first week, we also had a lab barbecue on the roof of the psychology building, but all we ate were Chinese food so I don't really know why they called it a barbecue. We played a few more icebreaker games and I got to know the members of the lab a lot better.
I was given a lot of primary literature to read, some of which I have already read during school. In our lab, we have a reading group every Tuesday where we gather as a group to talk about specific papers and approach questions that we may have about these papers. Each reading group will be led by specific students as well as a graduate student who chose the articles. The purpose of these reading groups are for us research assistants to be familiar with the field, as well as improve our abilities to read scientific journals. Reading groups officially start next week, but I am not too worried about them because of all the practice I've had during EXP.
Within the first week, Mika has given me and another research assistant the jobs of making fake toys for her. It is called a fake toy because it is rigged so that only the researchers would be able to operate it successfully. I really liked it when Mika said to us: "You're going to have to get used to making children fail," because it is an apt summary of what my summer will be like.
For this particular toy, we would be asking the children to balance the blue hammer-looking object on the yellow box. However, it is impossible because the purple head of the object is heavier than the rest of its body, therefore it will always fall over. The trick to this toy is that the researcher would have a magnet that can be inserted under the box for the blue object to be balanced on the box. The researcher would hide this magnet from the children, ensuring that the children will fail at handling the toy, and unveil the magnet to the children when the researcher wants them to succeed at the toy. My job was to replicate the box, since the current yellow box is quite old, and I have accomplished this within this week. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of the the new box made by me, therefore I will link it into my next blog.
Overall, I've really liked it here. The weather is sunny and cool, my parents aren't around, and there's a lot of food. :)
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