The Gab Lab: Week 5/Last Week

Hi everyone. This is Michelle again, and I'll be posting about my fifth and final week at the Gabrieli Lab at MIT. This week was a little different in terms of less data entry work and more sort of 'one-off' opportunities. On Monday, I spent the morning as usual: updating current subject info on the database, scoring, and recording. However, I spent the afternoon observing an EEG, which meant that I was unable to attend a lunch meeting with Dr. Aaron Matfeld. Each EEG session is roughly 4 hours, as there is a lot of prep work and clean up involved. Nayeon and Calvin first showed me how to cleanse all the electrodes by soaking them for 10 minutes in an ionized solution. Then, we had to gel each individual node, and each node's corresponding attachment slot on the EEG cap.  When the subject came in, we adjusted the EEG cap on her, attached the chin straps, and in addition to plugging in all the nodes, we also attached special nodes under her eyes and ears to measure the vertical and lateral eye movement that I posted about several weeks ago. 

EEG Nodes

EEG Cap

When everything was set, we placed the subject in a dark room and monitored her brain's electrical signals as she performed various language training tasks such as the syntactic/semantic error test that elicits the N400 or P600 response. Next, we ran the first MAL training session with the subject. Since I've mentioned scoring and testing so much in all my posts, here's a quick rundown on how these testing sessions work. Each session consists of 30 vocab questions and 30 grammar questions. During the vocab section, subjects see a picture, and have to say the correct word in MAL. In the grammar section, subjects see a scene, and have to produce a grammatically correct sentence that describes it. A correct sentence has this layout: subject - article - object - article - verb - article. However, there are two classes of subjects and objects, and each class uses a different article (Ihn or Ihd). Furthermore, the verb's article (Ahn or Niy) is entirely dependent on the subject's class.

Example of vocab testing

On Tuesday, I met up with Kelly, the lab's psycho-educational evaluator, to talk about the psychological context of the tests I have been scoring. We talked about the KBIT (IQ test), the CVLT (you hear a list of 16 words and have to recall them over various periods of time/in various ways), the CnREP (you listen to made up words and have to reproduce them perfectly), and the WJ3 Sound blending test. Kelly ran a little bit of the sound blending on me, and I have to say, it was surprisingly difficult. In this test, you have to reproduce a word after hearing a recording of it that has been split up phonetically. For example, the word 'grasshopper' sounded like 'guh-ra-ss-huh-opp-er'. Kelly also talked about the role standard deviation, standardized scores, and normalization play in these tests. 

On Wednesday, Cirkine and I got to shadow Maiya in the hospital! In addition to researching at the Gab Lab, Maiya is a neurologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Maiya showed us around the hospital, and we sat in on an interdisciplinary meeting. During this meeting, which is attended by 30 or so psychologists, neurologists, and neuropsychologists, several of these doctors spend 10 minutes presenting puzzling cases, ranging from memory loss to language problems, that they cannot seem to diagnose or solve. They show brain images of these patients, give us a brief medical history, and so on. Then, everyone in the room asks questions or gives suggestions as to what do next. I wish I could talk more about these cases as they were truly very fascinating, but I had to sign a confidentiality agreement. Because I was away for the day, I missed the weekly stats meeting with the LAP/CASL members, but Calvin was nice enough to send me a video that covered analysis of variance (ANOVA - basically a t test for multiple samples) to make sure that I was up to date.

The next morning, I did more sentence production scoring. Then I had my last meeting with Amy, in which she gave me lots of data for my poster. She also suggested that I send her multiple drafts of my poster so she can give me feedback; Thanks Amy! Next, all the interns went down to the MEG (Magnetoencephalograpy) lab for a tour (organized by Joanna & led by Demetrius). MEG is basically the same thing as the EEG, but it looks completely different, and uses magnetic fields instead of electrical signals to look at the brain. 

MEG (Your head goes up that tube thing!)

The MEG machine is in its own small room. Demetrius told us that the room weighs over 7 tons and is made of 3 layers of metal alloys in order to prevent magnetic fields from interfering with the process. 

Rather fittingly, my last day today was extremely relaxed and low-key. I spent the entire day scoring sentence production and saying my goodbyes/thank yous. 

Thank you to John Gabrieli for allowing me to participate in his lab. Thanks to Amy, Zhenghan, Michelle, Calvin, Jenni, Nayeon, and everyone else for an amazing experience. Thanks to Dr. Peretz for the opportunity to work in a lab and preparing all of us properly. I can say that after just 5 weeks at the Gab lab, I had a lot more fun than I thought I would, had a fantastic time, and would really love to pursue more research in the future.