Poster Day

So Poster day finally came around and I can say that it was a really good experience. I had always seen big conventions and conferences on tv and even in person, although not all of them were academic. I had always wanted to experience being one of the presenters and I got my chance on poster day.

At first I thought that not many people would come to my poster and ask questions. But as time went along, more and more people started flooding Vari hall and I was surprised to see so many people coming up to me and asking questions. It actually felt really good to be able to answer people's questions on something I did. The undergraduate students were good to talk to because some of them had already done it last year and some were going to be doing it next year and giving them ideas about how to do a poster presentation was very refreshing for me.

The professors and graduate students on the other hand were a different story. I could always tell which students were grad students because of the way they asked questions and the way they looked at my poster. I had 3 grad students that were basically doing their masters/phd on one of the conditions I had in my thesis and it was difficult talking to them about my topic because they knew vastly more about that one particular condition (bilingualism). But talking to the grad students was a piece of cake comapred to talking to Dr. Bialystok. She's the one that does research on bilingualism, and ALL 3 grad students that had approached me regarding bilingualism were from her lab! Dr. Bialystock herself was a little intimidating because she's considered one of the leading authorities in bilingualism in terms of attention, memory, inhibition, and other executive functions. But, talking to her was also very enlightening because she gave me some really good ideas as to what I could do in the future to make my study better, some of her ideas were similar to what I had already thought up however.


Over all, the poster day was a success for me. I enjoyed making the poster and I didn't mind paying the 130 something dollars to get it professionally printed. I'll probably put the poster up in my room.


Poster day FTW!

Look into my eyes... I will tell you if you have a disorder!

So I went through about 25+ articles trying to find evidence supporting that antisaccade tasks were effective at detecting impaired inhibition.  Makes sense right? If you can't stop yourself from doing something then you probably have an impaired inhibition component of executive functioning.  Well that's exactly what the antisaccade task does.  McDowell et al. (2002) used an antisaccade task on schizophrenic patients who are known to have a deficient inhibition mechanism.  Now the results may seem intuitive to you all, schizophrenics will generate more errors and have higher latencies, but its kinda important all the same.  If schizophrenics have a lower inhibition mechanism and the antisaccade task can detect that, then its possible that many other disorders have it too and the antisaccade task can detect that too... In fact, its possible that certain disorders can be treated effectively simply by teaching people how to be more in control of themselves, for example eating disorders.  Imagine that, being able to tell if people have a disorder simply by looking into their eyes!  Now of course, that's stretching the bounds of scientific methodology, but its interesting no?  To be able to tell, at least partly, that certain individuals may have some sort of impairment based on how they move their eyes. Gives new meaning to looking into someone's eyes doesn't it?