Day 1 of the Summer School in CogSci!!
9:30 am. Lecture Hall Room 409, New Bulgarian University (NBU), Sofia.
First thing I can say is that I'm really nervous.
Mostly about the fact that I'm a high school student while everyone else is a college student working on their bachelor's or master's degrees who have already had plenty of experience studying cognitive science-related subjects. AND they're people who study together in the New Bulgarian University. There's several other people from various countries in Europe, but it's mostly Bulgarians.
I'm typically a very social person and have no problem making friends, but I feel incredibly out of place.
Registration is from 9:00 am to 10:30 am, and there's only about 4 or 5 other people here already, so I'm sure I'll feel more comfortable when more students arrive.
This is my schedule for today:
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Monday, July 10th
9:30 - 10:30 am ………………………….. Registration
11:00 - 12:30 am …………………………. Jukka Hyona (University of Turku, Finland) - Using eye movements to study language processing and visual cognition
12:30 am - 2:00 pm ……………………... Lunch
2:00 - 3:30 pm ………………………….... Rufin Vogels (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium) - Neural mechanisms of visual cognition
4:00 - 4:45 pm ……………………………. Small Groups
5:00 pm ……………………………………. Cocktail
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Jukka Hyona is a Finnish expert in cognitive psychology and is a professor in the Department of Psychology and speech-language patterns in the University of Turku (Finland). He will be giving lectures only during this first week and will be talking about visual cognition, eye movement, and text relevance.
Rufin Vogels is a Belgian expert in cognitive neuroscience and biological psychology and is a professor in the University of Leuven (Belgium). He will also be giving lectures only during this first week and will be talking about stimulus-related neuroimaging and neural networks that provide a framework for visual and brain information processing.
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10:40 am. Same lecture hall.
I just spent the last 30 minutes participating in a study/experiment for a Psychology student named Aneta who is studying here at NBU.
She's studying memory - specifically how developed the skills of facial recognition and memory are in males and females.
Females, Aneta says, typically have a better short and long-term memory of different faces, while males typically are better at spatial recognition (for example, if they are asked to remember a specific face and then are shown a photo of that face from a different angle, they have a higher chance of recognizing it than females).
The experiment that I participated in was made up of 4 parts, all done on a computer.
The first part required me to just sit and look at faces that would flash on a screen at intervals of about 7 seconds - each interval would show me the portrait and profile views of a single person's face. After 7 seconds, the face would change. This went on for about 2 or 3 minutes, with some of the faces repeating.
The second and third parts involved some spatial recognition of rotating objects as well as spatial recognition of faces, and the third part required me to recall the faces of the 20 or so people that were shown to me in the first part.
This fourth section was most difficult for me, because the computer would show me a face and I had about 7 seconds to say whether or not I had seen it before. The entire section took about 4 minutes, and most of the faces repeated so at the end I was confused: was I remembering the face because I had seen it in the first part, or because I had seen it in the fourth part and it was just repeating?
All in all, this was a cool little icebreaker for me because I got to meet a person not involved in the cogsci program and get my jitters out so that I'll be comfortable the rest of the day.
4:45 pm. Bench outside the main building.
Well, it's glaringly obvious to me that I am not on the same level as most of the people here.
I just sat in on a small group session with Rufin Vogels to discuss a scientific paper about 'stimulus-related imaging in task-engaged subjects'.
The study basically looked at the brain activity of monkeys when engaged in a task (fixation when a red spot of light is shown) vs when not engaged in a task (allowed to move freely when a green light is shown). The question asked in the study, from what I understood, was whether neuroimaging most linearly measures spikes or LFPs.
I'm going to write up little summaries and post my notes on the lectures, so I won't get into detail about what the paper discusses.
But what daunts me the most is that I didn't understand half of what Mr. Vogels was saying. I was following along and I got the gist of what the study was about and the main questions the experimenters were asking, but there were a lot of complicated figures and statistics that I just couldn't comprehend.
If I don't understand what's going on on the first day, how am I going to keep up the rest of the time? It's probably going to get harder from here on out.
5:00 pm. On-campus bar/cafe for cocktail party.
Yup. There's a cocktail party for participants. This is awesome.
5:15 pm. Same bar/cafe.
Phew. Okay, I am definitely not the only one utterly confused about the study Mr. Vogels was explaining to us. Apparently it's one of the harder things we're going to be doing, and even fourth-year psychology students and people who are working on their master's degrees didn't understand it.
RELIEF.
7:00 pm. Back at the apartment.
I'm not completely used to traveling around the city yet, because we travel by bus. It takes me around an hour to get from the hotel to the school, even though it's about 20 minutes by car.
We have an assignment to complete for Mr. Vogels - to read two other scientific papers.
Oh dear.
Here we go.
