Skip to main content

Amy-Weeks 5&6

For the last two weeks of my research intern, I worked on a project on the origin of social bonding
through shared experience with Wouter, a grad student in our lab, in addition to previous projects that I
have been working on. Since the experiment section of the study requires observing chimpanzees,
Wouter actually went to Africa to collect the data by recording the chimpanzees on video during the trials.


Though the study aims to observe both kids and chimpanzees, the design of experiment is the same.
The study has two conditions for both situations: the first one is joint attention (JA) condition, in which
partners (either kid and experimenter or two chimpanzees) look at the same screen, while the second
one is disjoint attention (DA) condition, in which partners look at different screens or somewhere else.
Then we would observe if the participants in JA set-up would be more likely to be near their interaction
partners after watching the video. It turned out that chimpanzees were not only more likely to approach
to their interaction partners, but also did it faster after JA condition than they did in DA condition. While I
was coding their behaviors, it was intriguing to see the contrast between JA condition and DA condition:
while two chimpanzees could fight with each other in DA, they could become quiet and even stay in the
same room for a long time in JA. Though my research comes to an end,I’m still grateful for this
experience and everyone who made this experience possible.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kylie Heering, Week 2 at the Goldstein Lab

We started off our week with a congratulatory acai bowl trip to celebrate Preston’s acceptance into a training grant program. Acai bowls in California top Playa Bowls (no question about it). From what I can tell, its a pretty huge honor to be recognized by this grant, but he’s really humble about it. On Monday, Preston and I decided that testing antibodies that have never been tested on prostate epithelial cells before would be a good objective for my first Western blot on my own. We needed to probe for ASCT2, a glutamine transporter, and GLS in order to determine if their corresponding antibodies are functional. Antibodies are crucial for Western blots because they bind to the protein of interest (POI), allowing for us to qualify its expression after imaging. As such, Preston wanted to make sure they worked by probing for ASCT2 and GLS on three different cell lines. Cell lines are commercially purchased human cells that have been immortalized (modified to grow indefinitely) by telome...
Post a Comment
Read more

Alan - First Week at UCSF

Hi Everyone! After arriving in San Francisco last Sunday, I spent this past week settling into the downtown Berkeley apartment that I’ll be sharing with Rohit for the next couple of months, as well as learning my way around the Roy lab at UCSF. First day at the lab was really exciting. Here are a couple pictures of the Mission Bay campus, which was completed just a few years ago. Everything is super new and modern, and there’s still construction for other buildings going on around the campus. Most of the people who work at the Mission Bay campus are either professional researchers or doctors/nurses for the nearby hospital. The graduate students take most of their classes at the original Parnassus campus (where Maya is). I work in Byers Hall, which is connected to Genentech Hall and a short walk down the block from the shuttle stop. There are three other volunteers working for the Roy lab this summer – Kimmai, David, and Pujita, who are all undergrad college students...
1 comment
Read more

Jaewon Oh - Week 7 and 8

Finally done here with my experience and I wish I had more time keep researching so that I have something a little more "finalised" to present. But I guess that's what past EXP kids meant when they said that 8 weeks of research is not enough and I'll have to work with what I've got. To solve the problem of not having enough data points, we used the online TCGA database for raw data that would be used to calculate mutation rates. Mutation rates were calculated through an R coding script that Dr. Cannataro had made. Because the mutation rates were tumor specific, we had to change the proportions that were obtained from the IARC database using data from another database called cBioPortal. Basically we had to multiply the number of times a certain variant was seen in the IARC database by the percentage of tumors that have a tp53 mutation, because our mutation rates are calculated across all tumors in specific cancers (confusing, I know). After graphing the mutatio...
Post a Comment
Read more