Abhi Elayidom, Week 4, My First Lab Meeting & More

          After commuting back and forth from my house to the Rutgers lab in Newark for four weeks, I feel like I’m slowly getting more comfortable and used to it. My fourth week at the Cognitive Computational Development Lab was pretty short. My lab was closed both Monday and Tuesday, so I wisely used those two days to get a head start on the piles of summer work that I have to get through before school starts in the fall. July 4^th was a blast. I went to a friend’s barbecue, ate tons of food, and watched the beautiful fireworks at a park near my house.

 

   

 

          When I got back on Wednesday, the lab was still very quiet. The members of the lab had traveled back to their families to spend their long weekend at home and there so naturally there was not a lot of movement in the lab. Besides that, my lab manager was pretty busy because there were two new members of the lab. During the summer, in my lab, there is a lot of research being conducted for several different studies so a lot of research assistants are hired to help out. Being so young in a professional lab setting in a time when new employees are being hired is quite interesting. Although I’m definitely 5 or more years younger than most of them, it is always funny and cool when I get to teach them about either the studies being conducted in the study or a valuable tool like how to access important files of the lab. The truth is that one gets a good feeling when they feel valued and trusted to teach others. Until now, I have only used the information that I have learned in the lab for myself. Now, I can use it to help others and show them about the amazing research done in the lab.

 

 

 

 

          Also, on Wednesday, Trisha Dehrone taught me how to code the videos for the Learned Empowerment Study. I have been working with her on the project and have gone testing with her numerous times and I finally got to transfer the data from those videos onto excel sheets which will later help to draw conclusions about the study. Basically, to break it down, the coding for the study works in a simple way. There are 3 parts to the “procedure” that we go through each time we test a child. On top of that there are 2 conditions, the learned empowerment condition and the learned helplessness condition. First, the child walks in and Trisha and I introduce ourselves and basically tell the child that we are going to play a few games with them. Next, Trisha pulls out turtle coloring sheets and shows the child and me the crayons that she has for me and the crayons that she has for the child. The main difference is that Trisha gives me a beautiful box of twenty nicely-sharpened crayons and then gives the child four broken overused crayons.

 

 

 

          Naturally, the child realizes that the situation that they are in is unfair. In the learned helplessness condition, Trisha agrees with the child that the situation they are in is unfair, but that they can’t really do anything about it. So, the child feels stuck and can’t do anything about his or her situation. On the other side, in the learned empowerment condition, Trisha agrees with the child that the situation they are in is unfair, but in addition, she encourages the child to ask me whether I could share. Then, I say that we could play with what we have first and then later I could give them a try. This same scenario happens for the next task except instead of crayons, it is magic wands. I am given a light-up cool magic wand and the child is given a pair of chopsticks stuck together with tape. The same thing happens again and like the coloring task, the two conditions are carried out differently.

 

 

          After that, Trisha tells the child that I am going to help her with paperwork while the child plays with the novel toy. When Trisha hands the toy over to the child, she shows the child the most attractive function of the toy, the fan. Like I explained earlier in the last blog post, the novel toy is a complex toy with around 5 or 6 functions. Based on which condition the child is in, they will have 6 minutes to play with the toy and find as many functions as possible. Most of the time, in the learned helplessness condition, the child tends to mostly focus their attention to the fan or two or three functions at the most. However, in the learned empowerment condition, the child tends to branch out and use their sense of curiosity, discovery, and motivation to help them find as many functions as possible. In the last part of the procedure, the child is given a smiley face scale to determine how they felt in different parts of the procedure.

          The most interesting part of the experiment that always has a different effect on each child is their personality. After doing a good amount of testing, one can notice that the children who are naturally outgoing tend not to be incredibly affected by the learned helplessness condition. They simply brush it off and move on while still being cheerful and happy. What is so amazing about this is that they are still so positive and when rating their emotions with the smiley face scale, they will pick the happiest face saying that they had a lot of fun and they were not at all bothered by the unfair situations they were placed in.

          Towards the end of the week, the entire Cognitive Computation Development Lab had a lab meeting in Dr. Bonawitz’s house. It was so much fun because although I had met all of the members of the lab individually, I had never seen all of them in the same room together. It was honestly really awesome to see everyone just easily get along with each other so well. Although all of the members had their own project going on, they still seemed to be highly involved in each other’s studies. We all sat down in Dr. Bonawitz’s family room and basically discussed the upcoming projects and ideas in the lab. Many members had power point presentations that held the basic points of their presentation and I got to hear so many cool pitches for new studies. There was never a time when the room was quite because everyone was so involved in what was going on and was constantly giving back commentary and feedback. After the serious part of the lab meeting, we all sat down to play the game called Telestrations. The basics of the game are like Pictionary except you start off with a phrase and the next person draws a picture for the phrase and the person after them has to guess what the original phrase was from the drawing and it goes on 8 times. After everyone was done drawing and writing, Dr. Bonawitz went up and started going through all of the ridiculously funny pictures and phrases. In my opinion, having the lab meeting was great because although I would love to maintain professional relationships with the people in the lab, I also want to be friends with all of them and I felt like we really were all just friends during the lab meeting. There was no separation or hierarchy for who had the most degrees or who had the highest title. It seemed as if we were all just people in a room sharing ideas and enjoying each other’s company.