The final week of my lab was mostly uneventful because Bing had closed for the summer. The lab had sent out requests for parents to bring their children in voluntarily for research, probably with promises of cash, and the research assistants should only show up during the times that were booked by the parents. Therefore, I had more freedom and better control of the schedule since I could show up for the allotted time rather than staying for three hours waiting for Isabel to recruit children. This week's lab meeting was also the research assistant's turn to present their summer works. The lab meetings are usually done by the graduate students, but since most of the research assistants have programs that link to the lab (such as how I'm at the lab because of EXP) and most of us have to present for our programs, the lab thought it was a good opportunity for us to receive feedbacks and practice for future presentations. The meeting was attended by the whole lab, including the...
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The last two weeks wrap up my time testing at the Bing nursery school. The balancing toy had malfunctioned again, which meant that I had to secretly switch blocks underneath the table once again. We were able to view the data for the first time, and strangely there was a correlation in our data! It seemed that the children who were observed failing seemed to persist more in trying to balance the impossible toy than children who were observed both failing and succeeding, in contradiction to Isabel's theory that it depends on how stubborn a child is. Based on our results, we reject our earlier hypothesis that the children in the Accurate condition would attempt more than the children in the Fail condition on the impossible toy. Initially, we believed that children in the Fail condition would give up on the toy sooner because they may not wish to keep failing in front of someone who has watched them only failed. However, our results lead us to believe that perhaps children...
With only one week left in the lab, Anna and I are rushing to collect as much data as we can before I leave. After spending basically all of July staining and imaging, we can finally devote some time to quantifying those images. Fortunately, we can pull a lot of data from the images we've collected through a program called Imaris. Unfortunately, some of that data must be collected by hand counting. For example, in order to determine the total number of sensory terminals and how many GABApres are on each sensory terminal, we must go through the Z-stack on the computer and quite literally count how many blue dots there are and how many yellow dots are on each blue dot. Sounds fun, doesn't it? The best part is that each image takes an average of 3 hours to quantify and we have 18 images to do!! So much fun!! But in all seriousness, the data analysis portion of this project is actually quite interesting, for comparing one simple thing, like the difference in size of the sensory ter...
My mentor's other research assistant, Isabel, and I have begun consistently testing at the Bing nursery school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. By now, we've already had the script memorized and have many times had to improvise when the child doesn't follow our script. An example was one incident when Isabel, following our usual protocol, presented the child with a picture of me and asked him if I could come in to watch him play with the toys. The child casually responded, 'No,' and I could see Isabel starting to panic a little since the whole point of our experiment was to have a stranger observe the child play. Isabel questioned the child as to why he did not want me to be inside of the game room, and it turns out the child doesn't want to share his toys with me. As a result, we had to compromise with me observing him from the doorway instead of sitting right next to him. Other than that, testing has been hard because none of the children wants to go to the...
Thank god I chose to stay here for 9 weeks because 6 weeks is honestly not enough! Even with antibody staining after antibody staining and 4 hour sessions on the confocal microscope, only now are we finally starting to collect usable data. As I've learned from my past month here, most of lab is troubleshooting, figuring out what to do next when (because it will) something goes wrong. I've realized that in order to be a successful scientist, you must stay optimistic and open-minded. If you are the kind of person that gives up the second something goes wrong, you'll walk in and walk out of the lab in less than 10 minutes. But even with an open and optimistic mindset, it can get extremely frustrating at times. Just last week, Anna and I were trying to learn how to use a program called Imaris to quantify the images we got after spending the whole week harvesting the tissue, sectioning it and staining it - a process that takes the whole week. Then, once we're sitting in fron...
In the past two weeks, I have begun testing on children at the Bing nursery school. The nursery is a part of the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, and was a gift from Dr. Peter S. Bing and his mother, Mrs. Anna Bing Arnold. The children enrolled at the nursery are mostly available as research subjects for the Stanford Psychology Department since their parents have given consent to their participation in research. Despite this, the nursery is extremely nice and has all sorts of activities for the children to partake. Within the nursery, there are three main classrooms for the children and experimental rooms for the researchers. These experimental rooms are called 'game rooms' because in order to get a child to participate in their research, an experimenter would have to ask them to come to the game room to play with the experimenter's game. Within these game rooms are cameras, microphones, and a one-way mirror, where the children can be observed from an observat...
By the end of four weeks, I finally feel a little more comfortable in my lab. Even though everyone was incredibly welcoming and inclusive since the first day, it took me a while personally to be able to relax and offer help when I have nothing to do. I have essentially gone through the whole process of how we collect data in lab including everything from dissection to confocal imaging. My mentor, Anna, was not here this week because she went home for the holiday. As a result, in addition to working on my project, I was able to learn a little more about what everyone else in the lab is doing. Even though Anna and I work with the central nervous system, investigating the spinal cord and cerebellum, most of the lab is involved in the enteric nervous system, investigating small intestine and colon tissue. I was able to observe, learn more about and even dissect some gut tissue from our mice (it's not as gross as you think, or at least it wasn't to me). The biggest adjustment I ha...
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 arrived at Stanford around 9 am and met with my PI, Julia, and the lab manager, Anna, I will be working with. There are 3 graduate students in the lab including Anna, one postdoc, one undergrad, and obviously the PI; everyone in the lab is incredibly friendly and welcoming. The people in the Kaltschmidt lab really helped in making me feel at home. While I was a little nervous about living by myself in a foreign city, I feel comfortable asking questions and helping with projects in the lab. On my first day, I saw a mouse get euthanized and decapitated (sorta morbid). This lab is very hands on and it seems as though I will have a lot to do and a lot to learn. After learning a bit about my project in the morning, Anna and I went out for lunch at the Nexus Cafeteria on campus. After lunch, I learned some other things like how to drain the poop out of the guts of a mouse, antibody staining and how to use a confocal microscope, and went back to the apartment around 5 pm. Anna has kept me p...