缅北强奸

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Mr. Joseph Schull and Ms. Anna Yang for their generous support of my remote summer internship at the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University in Japan. With the funding from the Schull Yang International Experience Awards, I was able to focus on strengthening my research skills and receiving training on post experimental data analysis without worrying about my living expenses during this summer internship in Japan.

My name is Xueying (Christy) Shao, a U3 student with a Cognitive Science major and an Interdisciplinary Life Science minor. Those two programs provide me with the opportunity to embrace the interdisciplinary nature of neuroscience. With my longer-term goal of conducting academic research, this summer, I was actively looking for a research internship that is involving different neuroscientific technologies and a variety of participants. Kyoto University Primate Research Institute (KUPRI) is well-known for its research in animal cognition, especially in animal learning and memory. The related experiments conducted here became an important topic that all psychology students at 缅北强奸 will learn about in our lectures. Therefore, an internship at KUPRI was very attractive to me.

I was very lucky to find Professor Yukiori Goto鈥檚 Lab at KUPRI, which belongs to the cognition and learning section, and takes an evolutionary perspective to study maladaptive behaviors in primates and humans. For human studies, they particularly study the differences between populations with and without a psychiatric disorder. I am very excited because I am also interested in neuropsychiatry and had previous experience doing research at a psychiatric hospital. Therefore, when I expressed my interests to Professor Goto, I received a positive reply about the summer internship.

It was a very difficult year in applying for international research activities, like many other students, my internship was completed in a remote format. The assigned project of my internship was 鈥淣eural and cognitive correlates of social biases and conformity.鈥� To be specific, it is a human study focusing on the neural activities during social interaction. My task was to assist a PhD student in Prof. Goto鈥檚 lab, Ms. Srishti Tripathi, to do post experimental analysis for a set of fNIR and eye-tracking data. In her experiment design, she combines these two technologies to study the perception of grief facial expression 鈥� which can be a key indicator to our daily social interaction. Ms. Srishti is a very nice mentor who is approachable and gives me advice whenever I need it. We contacted each other via video meeting platforms, audio calls and emails.

Social cognition is a field that is heavily influenced by culture. In western culture, the way people talk, the use of gestures, and the information conveyed by facial expressions can be very different from Asian culture, especially in Japanese culture. As an Asian born international student at 缅北强奸, I am very curious about how Asian culture affects facial expression perception specifically. However, I found that the related studies at 缅北强奸 are predominantly conducted in western populations, therefore this internship at KUPRI provided me with this unique opportunity.

At the beginning of my internship, I was instructed to read several journal articles about the use of fNIR and eye-tracking technologies in neuroscience. The fNIR, functional near-infrared spectroscopy, is a relatively young technology that is non-invasive, portable to use, and can measure brain activities by near-infrared light. Eye-tracking is also widely used in visual neuroscience research. Beyond the scope of my project, I also found interesting studies that are using eye-tracking to study visual art perception and appreciation. This founding undeniably opened up a new world for me, inspired me to acknowledge my research interests in neuroaesthetics and make my academic goal clearer in the future. Later this year, I am planning to apply for graduate school to do research in art and cognitive neuroscience related fields.

Data analysis is a crucial part in a research project. Despite having taken statistics and programming courses at 缅北强奸, applying the knowledge to practice can be challenging. During my internship, under Ms. Srishti鈥檚 mentoring, I spent time learning R language in data analysis from different forms of online resources. From performing basic tasks in data management, working on sample data and gradually to the actual experimental data sets, I not only became more familiar with R, but also with the concepts and strategies in data analysis such as GLMM(generalized linear mixed model). This was the first time I conducted a data analysis research internship. After completing it, I realized the importance of practing data analysis and its importance in academic research in general. In the future, I plan to receive further training in data analysis and make more efforts to become an independent researcher.

Through this international activity, I was able to work with researchers from different countries in a very different cultural setting. Beside gaining practical research and data analysis experience, I was also able to explore new research topics that allowed me to find my genuine research interest in applying for graduate school in the future. In closing, I want to sincerely thank Mr. Schull and Ms. Yang again for their generous support that made all of this possible.