Group Project Experience!

This semester has passed by so quickly. Can you believe it? I'm already writing my last blog post.

Anyways, onto the main topic. My group project experience for this class was amazing! Usually, I am reluctant to work on projects, especially group projects, because they are not very interesting and sometimes people aren't willing to do their share. But thankfully, my group (Shout out to Aarti and Emily!) is great and this project has been fun to work on. Plus the movies we picked were thankfully very good movies. We took our time about watching the movies, meeting up on three different Saturday nights watching the movies with popcorn and other snacks. (How awesome is it when a project involves popcorn and movie-watching?!) Putting together the project itself was also fun, as we all had a lot to contribute after watching our movies. There was quite a lot to discuss. I'm glad I got the chance to work with Emily and Aarti on this project. Because of this project, I was able to make friends with two awesome people (and watch great AI movies as well)!

Signing off,
Alice

Psych Study!

I participated in a psych study that involved filling out questionnaires about conflict scenarios involving a friend. I was given three packets containing scenarios involving "my friend" and was asked whether or not I felt the scenario was uncomfortable/wrong and how I would deal with each case, whether or not what was described would affect our friendship, and how it made me feel. After answering these questions about each of the scenarios I was "interviewed" by the study person and asked to verbally explain why I answered what I answered on the survey. Some of the scenarios were not very problematic. These were ones like helping out my friend with his/her homework. Others were more difficult, like one asking me what I would do if my friend and I had a crush on the same person. Because the study asked me (besides determining whether or not it would complicate our friendship or not) how I would deal with the situation, I thought that perhaps what it was trying to get at was how certain individuals respond to different social situations involving a friend, and perhaps the researchers were trying to map personality to action in relationship to this social scenario. I thought it was a cool study and was glad I got a chance to be a part of it.

I think it would have been very interesting to have participants do the same study (read the same scenarios) and see how their brains look in an fMRI. It would be interesting to make this purely psychology study more neuroscience-related.



-Alice Huang

My Friend's Dog

I'm a dog person (come on, who isn't?). I love dogs. They are fun to play with, soft to the touch, and as the old adage goes, man's best friend. However, my friend Matt has a dog who is anything but. The first time I met his dog, he growled at me and barked his head off showing fangs and all. I was trying to pet him and just as I extended my hand towards him he went berserk. I have never been scared of a dog before in my life until I met Matt's dog. Apparently, the dog hates strangers, and the only people he will allow to touch him and come anywhere near him is my friend Matt and his family, which makes me wonder how the dog came to get accustomed to Matt and his family in the first place. Perhaps he was born into the family. I don't know. I never asked. The second time I met Matt's dog, the same thing happened. Needless to say, I have yet to pet Matt's dog, and I don't think I will be trying anytime soon.



-Alice

My Favorite Philosopher!

My favorite philosopher is also one of my favorite writers: Albert Camus, of The Stranger fame. His writings contributed to the movement in philosophy known as absurdism.

According to absurdism, humans are always in search of meaning in life, and this search often results in the individual concluding one of two things:

1. Life is meaningless
2. Life has a higher purpose endowed to it by some sort of higher power, God perhaps.

According to Camus, to accept the Absurd is to believe in the first--that life is meaningless. The latter results only in "elusion," an avoidance of the truth that is the meaninglessness of life. As well, hope falls into the category of "elusion" because by hoping one ignores the hard true fact that life is meaningless.

And according to Camus, recognition of the absurd, the acceptance of it, is the only true course of action one can take. (Suicide--while a possibility--is equated with chickening out and succumbing to the absurd.)

I think Camus is a very interesting philosopher in that his philosophy is one that takes some grasping. At first, perhaps, it might seem depressing and hopeless, but upon closer examination, what Camus is positing is for one to accept the meaninglessness of life and to live despite this understanding. In and of itself, it is a hopeful message.



-Alice

Favorite Economic Game!

My favorite economic game hands down is the prisoner's dilemma because it shows how two people might ultimately choose not to cooperate despite the benefits of working together. This is of course because saving oneself is the easier route to take as well as the safer one. (If the other individual does not cooperate, then the individual will be screwed.)

The cool thing about the prisoner's dilemma is that it can model real-life situations.

Take for example the Cold War, in which NATO and the opposing Warsaw Pact had nuclear weapons aimed at each other. The two opposing alliances had the choice of disarming. The ideal is for both to disarm, but the fear was that the opposing side would be armed while one was disarmed, in which case the opposing side was likely to fire away. So even though it was ideal for both sides to be disarmed (peace is of course the universal goal), it was much more rational to be armed than not to be, which was exactly what happened for the thirty years of the Cold War.

The prisoner's dilemma thus shows how what one interprets as another individual's decision will affect one's own decision--how decision-making can in fact be affected socially. Cool, don't you think?



-Alice

Lecture Blog #1: Elizabeth Tricomi on the Contextual Influences on Value Representation in the Human Brain

This is rather late in coming as I had attended the lecture and forgotten about my notes until now. But nevertheless, here it is, my first blog entry on a guest lecture.

In her talk, Dr. Elizabeth Tricomi discussed how different contextual factors such as goals, experience, value, probability of reward, and social preferences influenced individual behavior.

She talked in detail about her research on the influence these contextual factors had on the brain's reward circuitry. Using fMRI, she has shown that rewards earned from goal-directed actions lead to activation of the caudate nucleus, which is part of the brain's reward circuitry. However, with more experience (a contextual factor), activity in the caudate nucleus changes because the behavior, before a means of attaining a goal, now becomes a habitual cue-triggered habitual response. Thus in order for the reward circuitry to activate, the actions taken must be goal-relevant--hence, context matters.

From her research, Dr. Tricomi concluded that the brain's reward pathway must integrate contextual information so that the individual can make circumstantial decisions and perform complex behaviors as influenced by the context.

Dr. Tricomi's talk was very interesting as her approach to the reward system in the brain is much different from the typical textbook explanation. We are taught that reward and punishment are mediated by a portion of the brain depending on pleasure and want and like concepts. However, we don't often consider reward in different contexts, which would definitely influence one's perception depending on the circumstances.



-Alice Huang

Breaking a Social Norm

I had the most difficult time figuring out what social norm to break for this week's blog. Luckily, I didn't have to brainstorm for too long because opportunity knocked at my door.

My friends and I went to a Halloween-themed dessert-tasting event hosted by one of the dorms on campus. Since my roommate had been pulling an all-nighter for an exam, I was charged with bringing back some of the cupcakes, brownies, cookies, etc. that were being offered at the event.

After having our fill of sweets, we decided to head to Wilson gym to grab some smoothies at Quencher's and I was charged with holding a plate full of sweets. Bringing in dessert to the gym was definitely a first for me. There's an obvious discrepancy when someone brings dessert into the gym where the goal is to attain good physical health and perhaps run off the guilty calories from the raspberry cheesecake one had for dinner. Nevertheless, I walked in with an assortment of brownies, cookies, and cupcakes.

At first I didn't think much of it, but when both my friends refused to take on the task, I became somewhat self-conscious of doing so. When we walked up to the front desk, the person in charge of swiping our cards laughed and asked if the cupcake was for him.

After that, I didn't think much of it because if I didn't hurt anyone by breaking the social norm and if anything, bringing dessert into the gym helped brighten someone's day a little.



-Alice Huang