Danny Kim, Entry #4, Fourth week at the lab

This week has been the busiest week for sure, but it was also the most exciting week of all. I actually felt like I was useful. For the first half of the week, I continued on learning how to use MATLAB and helped with the sessions with the patients, mostly children with Dup15q syndromeor autism spectrum disorder. My research coordinator, Scott told me to pay attention to the eye tracking part of the session. The patients were shown different videos - some with socialization and some with no socialization between the people. And the results from the eye tracking of these children were going to be the ones I would input and use to analyze.

And finally, on Wednesday, college student from France came back, and we worked together to change the results into analyzable data using coding. But, it was more like her writing a code and then explaining to me how and why she wrote it. We had many errors and had to revise several times. For example, we were trying to get the percentage of time when the patient was focused on the faces on the screen and the number of fixations. But then, we would get very high percentage of time on faces but very low number of fixations, which contradicted themselves. We tested many results from the patients and finally got it to work. Next week, we would spend time inputing all the data and make graphs to visualize and analyze them. I feel quite nervous, as we would most likely need to present this in front of the whole lab in a lab meeting.

This weekend, my parents came to LA and took us all to a Korean BBQ place. The food was great and it was good to see my parents once in a while.