Given my dual interest in cognitive neuroscience and
biochemistry, I sought research experience in both areas.
During the summer of 2001 and the summer of 2002, I served as an
intern at the Albany College of Pharmacy under the direction of
Dr. Robert Levin. My primary task was to conduct
biochemical analyses of rat bladder tissue as part of a larger
project to determine the impact of temporary ischemia
(deprivation of oxygen and glucose) on the level of cellular
functioning in these tissues. An additional goal was to
determine whether introducing vitamin E could mitigate the
damaging effects. We did not find a significant effect of
the vitamin.
At Stony Brook University during my sophomore, junior and
senior years (2004-2006) , I worked on EEG recordings in the
cognitive psychology lab of Dr. Nancy Squires. I assisted
a postdoctoral fellow Allen Azizian on an ERP (event related
potential) study of responses to picture and word stimuli.
The study used an “oddball paradigm” in which subjects were
shown pictures and words for various objects. Their task was to
indicate when they detected a previously defined target stimulus
(in this case an umbrella) and report whether the target
appeared in picture or word form. We examined the P300
component and found both shorter P300 latencies and broader
areas of activation when subjects were shown a picture of the
target as compared to when the stimulus word was presented.* This finding lent support to Paivio’s dual-code
hypothesis
for the superior memory of pictures relative to words: given the
ERP component differences, it seems that pictures are processed
more extensively in memory than are words.
During the summer of 2005, I acquired additional research
experience in biochemistry as it relates to memory, working in
the lab of Dr. Cliff Kentros at the University of Oregon.
The focus of his research was the functioning of place cells in
the hippocampus, which we studied using single-unit recordings
from transgenic mice. The experience taught me how to
genotype mice and how to create new genetic constructs through
PCR. While there I also became acquainted with
techniques in electrophysiology and behavior analysis.
For my senior honors thesis, I returned to Dr. Squires’s lab and
continued my work on dual-code theory, this time using the
behavioral measures of reaction time and accuracy. I
wanted to test a specific prediction of Paivio’s theory that, to
my knowledge, had never been tested. According to Paivio,
concrete features of a stimulus should be more easily accessed
via the “picture store,” while abstract features should be more
easily accessed via the word store. The task involved
showing participants pictures and words for various animals and
asking them to make a rapid judgment about either a concrete
attribute of the animal (i.e. whether the animal was larger than
a beagle) or an abstract attribute (i.e. whether the animal
lived in or near water). It was predicted that for the picture
stimuli, subjects would be faster at making the concrete
judgment, while for the word stimuli they would be faster at
making the abstract judgment. Unfortunately, our results
were confounded because, as we realized later, the concrete
judgment required a comparison of two different animals while
the abstract judgment did not. Therefore, the concrete
judgment took longer for both classes of stimuli.
* Presented at the 2004
meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research:
Azizian, A. Watson, T.D., Paynter, C., and Squires, N.K. Effects
Of Pictorial And Word Stimuli On P300 And Reaction Time.
