PhD Degree

Got my degree today in the mail. This has got to be the hardest sheet of paper to obtain in your lifetime!

Boston 2009

This is my first time to Boston, the beginning of America. The brief history is that the revolution of early settlers began here against the British colonialist at the time. It was a bunch of people living in Boston Commons, who held radical views of freedom, that banded together and stood up to the military authorities at the time. Today, Boston is full of history...and oysters.

In fact, Charlene and I are here for the Psychophysiological Society annual meeting. This is the 50th anniversary of the conference and there was much to celebrate. This was my first time to attend this conference, and I was a little unsure of what to expect. Of course, this is not a neuroscience conference, so I did not expect to see the usual crowd. But to my surprise, I actually met a lot of old friends here. A bunch of people from the cognitive aging group, some people from Singapore, some friends from Japan, and a lot of people from Illinois! It felt good that this conference was, to me, more about meeting people than it was explicitly about the posters and talks, although some of those were interesting.

Back to the oysters. Have I ever told you that Boston oysters (which are actually mostly from Maine or at least, further out at sea and are so technically not from Boston), are awesome? You can taste the sea in them. Basically, you should eat these raw. Don't even bother with the lemon, and don't drown yourself in oysters. Have a few, like 3 or 4. And stop. And let the ocean water that was sucked up by the oysters cleanse your body as it permeates your mouth. Seriously, that's really what its like.

Fortuitously, we also met an old Singaporean friend who brought us to an awesome place farther out from Boston (Chung Shin Yuan) for the best bowl of 牛肉面, 豆漿 and 油條 that I have had in a long time.

And now...back home! Yay!

Berlin 2009

After participating for a week in a conference in Chicago (Society for Neuroscience, 2009), Charlene and I headed towards Europe. She was attending another conference (Society for Psychophysiological Research, 2009) and I was attending a vacation.

The origins of this trip to Europe for me, began with quite a lot of trouble. Namely because at the time of thinking about going for this trip, I was caught up in writing my dissertation, flying about between labs, worrying about data, and the future, and about spending money, and going home. But things happened, and I thought that this would be worth it, with the pleasant company (of course that alone is enough!), the seeing of new places, and the partaking of glorious beer and sausages. Besides, some people reflected to me that Berlin is a donut of a place.

This was my first time to Berlin, and my first time to Europe, actually. And I have to say, it was more than worth it. The culture alone is enough to leave a novel thought in my head. And that is saying something! One is reminded of reality, and its depth, which brings a sense of peace. But, enough of such philosophical nonsense. Here's a sample of the most impressionable experiences.

While Charlene was hard at work in the SPR conference meetings, I took a walk around Alexanderplatz and Museum Insel. For those of you who are well informed, Alexanderplatz is where Jason Bourne arranged to meet Nicki, "kidnapped" her in front of a bunch of snipers surrounding the area, brought her to one of the station underground service rooms, interrogated her and frightened the socks of of her to find out some secret info. This photo shows the world clock that is at Alexanderplatz.

We met Koki there and his friend, Goran, works at the Max Planck Institute (which I also visited). Goran mentioned this rather hole-in-the-wall place that sold the famous curry wurst. It is called Konnopke's Imbiss, and is at Eberswalderstrasse. The shop is basically a trailer underneath the train tracks. There is apparently always a long line of people waiting to buy the curry wurst, along with a large family of pigeons. Careful while standing there! The curry wurst is probably not anything special...but in the cold of the Berlin autumn weather, standing around with friends, and with a Berliner Pilsner, any sausage instantly transforms into a gourmet satisfaction.

On the last night of our time there, Charlene and I caught some Berlin Opera in authentic diaphragmatic German. Ich lieber du, Ich lieber du! The Rosenkavalier was the opera. Again, worth watching for its beauty. After that, we strolled down the famous Unter de Linden and saw the famous Brandenburger Tor (not the alcoholic burger, but the Brandenburg gate). Before seeing this, I thought, its just a gate. After seeing it, I thought, wow...a lot of things happened here. Incidentally, there is really a U2 train station here, in coincidence with the U2 band, which played here during the celebration of the fall of the wall.

We also managed to pass by the wall without taking a photo of it...so too bad. This is because the wall is really gone. Nuff said.

Finally, we ended our trip with a belly full of Eisbein (the famous Berlin pork knuckles) and the famous Berlin meat balls. In the famous Berlin restaurant called Standig Vertretung. Which is located at Friedrichstrasse. Incidentally, Friedrichstrasse is where Jason Bourne dashes out from the hotel (also in Berlin, Berliner Zeitung), runs to the train station to evade the cops, jumps onto a boat under the station (which is over the Spree river), climbs back up on the other side of the bridge, and gets into another train and escapes.

Berlin...Ich glauber sie haben mein beir, vergessen!

More photos [here]

Developments after...

This has got to be the wettest year ever. The rains got so bad this year that snow aphids snowed down on our small little town of Champaign. Winter rears its cold face around the corner now.

The reason why I am posting this now, is because I have just returned from a series of inspirational events. Traveling north and south between Champaign and Dallas takes its toll at times. You get up early at 6am, clean up, and get on the 7.30am flight (2 hrs). Reach DFW. Get onto the shuttle for the rental car mall of the airport (takes 15min). Get the car, drive to the Dallas lab (20min). Work. Check-in to Embassy Suites (which is an awesome hotel!). And on trips back, leave the lab by 4pm. Return the rental car, take the shuttle to terminal B of DFW. Pass security. Have a beer and a burger at TGIF in the airport before getting on the 6.50pm flight back to Champaign, and be picked up by a familiar face.

Do this 20 times.

Recently though, work has been progressing. Papers are being submitted. Finally. And hopefully accepted! But I think the most inspiring event happened yesterday. Instead of going south, I headed north and gave talks at Northwestern. The data seems well received and everyone seems so interested and in agreement. I felt glad. It was worthwhile to drive up 3hrs and back 3hrs for that one day of wonderful meetings and interactions.

Now, the main concern are next steps. Where to go after this one year of post-doctoral research? Another post-doctoral position? Faculty? Tough decisions with too many factors that plague my mind, that give no clear direction. No amount of grad school prepares you for this! For life!

One can only dive in.

PhD

Well, it is the start of the first weekend after defending. How was the defense? It was utterly fun. How often can you squash 5 brilliant minds in one room and have them talk about your work? How often can you debate with them and have them listen to your thoughts on things? How often can you hear them agree or even disagree with you in the most honest sense of it all? I would wish this on anybody who dares to try.

No one knows it all. But the defense is about stating what you know, and what you know you don't know. It is about being honest, and seeking truth. If what you find is real, it will bear itself. If what you think is true, you will find it. Sound familiar?

After the defense, we all went to Jim Gould's to have dinner. And it was, how shall I put it, fun! I think I felt it, that warmth of accomplishment. So that food tastes better. Sweetness has a fragrance, salt floods with depth, sour comes with juiciness, and bitter? There is no bitter.

Soon after, we watched an amazing movie - Inglorious Basterds! What a choice right? Brad Pitt was brilliant. Incidentally, Brangelina was in my defense.

The next day, I cleaned up the mess that was my apartment. It felt good to exert mindless sweat. The day after, we watched Mamma Mia. Tomorrow, BBQ!

That's what PhD is about, what happens before and after.

On the road to Permanent Head Damage

It is just one more week to the final defense. The big D day literally. I have submitted my dissertation draft, after reading it for the hundredth time, re-crunching the numbers for the thousandth, and clicked the save button on Word for the millionth time. After sending the document off, and the first thought that came to mind was how stupid I was. Really. After devoting a whole month of intense thought on the data, I realize that that's all I really knew. And the other things around me took on their own life, grew up, and now, I don't recognitize them. So its going to take a while to reintegrate back into reality.

Now, its just one more powerpoint to go, and then...the same-o same-o. I sure hope all this is worth it! So far, it seems to be. If not for anything then just because life becomes a little clearer as we find out a little more, each step.

I like Douglas Adam's thought: Someone somewhere theorized that the minute a human being sits down and figures out how the universe works, it would immediately be replaced by another more complex universe...some say that this has already happened. Really, what I think about all this is that everything is like a donut. Nuff said.

Agnostic Brain, Biased Mind - what does the FFA do?

Many neuroimaging studies have repeatedly found an area in the human brain that seems to be involved in processing visual faces. This area located in the fusiform gyri in humans, has been affectionately named the fusiform face area or FFA. The FFA is most active when we are looking at pictures of faces, and almost non-responsive to other types of visual items such as objects, houses, scenes, random textures, or a blank screen. Prosopagnosics, who are not able to recognize faces, but are still able to detect the presence of a face and also show no difficulty in processing other types of visual stimuli, have been shown to involve less FFA activity. Even more compelling, patients with lateral occipital lobes lesioned lose some form of object-processing, but show intact face processing. And yet other patients with lesions that have affected the FFA, have problems with face processing (acquired prosopagnosia) but intact processing for other stimuli. The evidence strongly suggests that there is something special about faces, and something about the FFA that deals with this specialization.

The debate regarding the FFA pertain to whether it is the only region or even a critical region that does face processing. Some labs have shown that face processing information can be found in other regions of the brain that are not the FFA. Yet some labs have shown that the FFA is recruited to process fine levels of category distinctions. For example, bird and car experts have been shown to engage some level of FFA activity when processing these stimuli compared to novices. These findings suggest that the FFA is not processing faces per se, but visual representations that have come to require high-levels of fine discrimination through experience, of which faces are the best example of this currently.

I suggest that a more flexible definition is called for when thinking about the FFA and its role in processing visual information. Certainly, it does seem that faces occupy a special place in human experiences. On the other hand, it is difficult to explain why there would be a brain region that codes for faces and faces along based simply based on genetic or biologically determined causes.

In terms of a neural network, if indeed the brain consists of many different sub-types of neural networks that conglomerate to form one large complex network, the FFA is a sub-network specialized to perform a specific operation that is maximized and specialized (trained) for a specific information domain - faces. This or these specific operation(s) could involve identification, discrimination, recognition, or all of these, or even a yet unknown operation. Certainly neural network non-linearities can surprise us! Moreover, these operations have been tuned for a specialized class of stimuli that consists of eyes, nose, mouths, and other visual characteristics of faces when occurring together as a whole (whether from external input, or through internal imagination or retrieval).

What this means is that if you were able to "remove" the FFA, and plug it into a computer so that you can feed this FFA network with inputs and measure its outputs, you could theoretically feed it anything, but the information would be most meaningful or organized when the inputs correspond to information about a face. Of course, this would require us to know what is the language of the input to perform such an experiment.

Other types of inputs may elicit some level of meaningful output of the FFA. Neural network do that. Yet other types may elicit nothing at all. This does not necessarily mean that the FFA outputs from such inputs is useless, nor does necessarily mean that it is used! It is just output. What higher-level brain mechanisms do with the output depends on the task, and how the brain is wired to treat outputs from its sub-networks. It may be ignored, or it may actually incorporate relevant information. That is, the FFA is agnostic to the incoming information. It does not care. It will process it anyway. But other regions decide whether what is it saying needs to be incorporated or not, or if it should be further modified even.

Such a view would reconcile why the FFA is special for faces, yet seems to be carrying some information about other stimuli. It would also be consistent with the idea that information about faces is certainly also available to a certain extent in non-FFA regions, the same principles being applied to these other sub-networks. It would also be consistent with how self-organizing behavior in neural network (see von der Malsburg article [link]) can lead to a consistent topology across every person that processes a particular stimulus in a particular way in a particular spatial location.

This is probably not a new idea, but needs to be clarified in the literature I think.

Wicked Witch of the West steps on Scarecrow Brains with Magic Red Shoes

Charlene and I made this for Qinwei's birthday. We spent a whole week modifying things and planning what we could do to fit the Wizard of Oz theme. This is the result.

Ingredients

Green peppers

Red peppers

Bean sprouts

Rice

Can of corn

Carrots

Squash

Method

Cook the rice. Set it aside when done. First dice up the carrots and squash into small cubes. Make sure the corn is drained and dry. Pre-heat over to 350F. Start frying the carrots and squash in some oil. When they are almost done, add the corn and fry the mix for a few more minutes. Add the rice and mix the ingredients well under high heat. Add salt and pepper to taste. When done, cut the top off the green peppers, remove the seeds, and scoop the fried rice into the green peppers, making sure that they are compact. Coat the peppers with a little oil. Place the stuff green peppers into the oven, you can also bake the red pepper as well, it should take around 15-20 min. While the peppers are baking, stir fry the bean sprouts adding salt and pepper to taste. When the bean sprouts are done, lay them on the plate. Take the peppers out of the oven when done. Cut the red peppers into strips so that you can form little "shoes". Arrange them on the plate of bean sprouts, and place the whole green peppers on top of the red pepper shoes. Done! Wicked Witch of the West steps on Scarecrow Brains with her Magic Red Shoes.

3T Trio finds a new home in Beckman Institute

The Siemens 3T Trio is a full body MRI scanner. The Beckman Institute just recently acquired it. Today, the machine was brought to the basement of the Beckman building and we were fortunate enough to have some free time to glimpsed part of the process.

The scanner was brought in through a hole they have in the back of the building. It had rained the night before, so the ground around the hole was a little soggy. More importantly, they had to move fast because more rain was coming. The movers had to remove the heavy covers on the hole, lift the magnet bore and lower it into the basement, where there is a trolley for them to push the magnet into its final place. The movers took a break halfway because the rain did come anyway, before they could finish, but they continued later. As far as I know, the scanner is in the basement now, just waiting to be tested and used!

This is a full-body scanner, compared to the head-only scanner 3T Allegra. It should provide more uniform signal, although the 3T Allegra is sometimes better for certain sequences, or so I hear. So we'll see which one shines. They will move the 3T Allegra, head-only scanner, which is right now at the BIC down south, up into the Beckman basement as well, once this Trio is fully functional. There will still be about a month or so of testing and installation before we can begin to use it.

If you are my Facebook friend, you can check out other photos I have of this there [Facebook photo link].

An evening at Harvest Moon Drive-In

We went again to Bayern Stube, the German restaurant at Gibson City, just 40 min away from Champaign by car. This was to celebrate Sylvia's completion of her defense and graduating! Bayern Stube sells great beer and sausages, not to mention awesome desserts. Creme brule there is a must.

After dinner, we watched Year One at the nearby Harvest Moon Drive-In theater. Back in the good old days in Singapore, we used to have one drive-in theater at Jurong. This was taken over my mediacorp and turned into some place for housing film sets.

Harvest Moon Drive-In as two screens, and the thrill is not so much the movie, as it is the feel of sitting out under the stars, watching a screen, straining your ears to hear the dialogue from other peoples' car radios (you don't turn on your own because you are afraid the car battery will die out). And have that venture thwarted because the local train rolls by, chugging along on the metal tracks just behind the screen. The mosquitoes make a full meal out of you. Some people bring their sofas out behind the back of their trucks, some people bring their bbq. As the sun sets, the sky is glorious. All these make the movie a wonderful experience, no matter what the movie is about!

Cognitive abilities in kindergartners and first graders: A comparison, evaluation, and extension of models using data from Robinson et al. (1996)

Paper submitted for final in structural equation modeling class, Spring 2009, UIUC Psychology. This paper is a critique of Robinson et al.'s (1996) paper on "The structure of abilities in math-precocious young children: Gender similarities and differences", published in the Journal of Educational Psychology (Vol. 88, Iss. 2, p341-352). This current paper, though, focuses on the age differences in abilities of kindergartners and first graders.

It is known that very young children show less differentiated cognitive abilities. Children who perform well in tests such as those involving math, tend to have correlated performance in other tests such as in verbal tests. As children age and progress towards adolescence, however, their cognitive abilities becomes differentiated so that abilities such as math and verbal abilities are not necessarily equally developed in the child.

Presumably, this occurs because when children are very young, they are untrained and unaffected by external factors such as education and related experiences (e.g. streaming into majors). Thus, the best predictor of the child's performance is the individual difference or a general factor. With age, the child undergoes specialization where children start to develop more specific knowledge in selective domains. Some children become more trained at math, while others at language. Importantly, these abilities aren't always equally developed. This may be the underlying reason for differentiated abilities in older children.

This current paper is a methodological exploration of the data in Robinson et al. (1996) using various modifications of the basic structural equation model. The main results are consistent with differentiated abilities in first graders relative to kindergartners. Some discrepancies in Robinson et al.'s (1996) paper are noted as well.

[Download pdf of paper]

VSS Conference Day 4: Demo Night Exhibit

VSS Conference Day 4: Demo Night Dinner

VSS Conference Day 4: Beach Day

VSS Conference Day 4: My Poster

This poster was presented at VSS Conference 2009 [link to VSS website], morning session [download poster pdf]. This study investigated the effect of task instructions on repetition suppression in the brain. Repetition suppression refers to the phenomenon that the brain response to repeated stimuli is usually reduced or attenuated. It is thought that such reduction in brain response reflects less neuronal recruitment, and hence, a more "efficient" way of processing the same information.
In this study, however, I postulated that under certain circumstances, the brain requires more neuronal recruitment in order to effectively process information for task demands. That is, repetition suppression becomes inefficient because it reduces the degrees of freedom that the brain can use to manipulate existing representations.

The study evaluated brain response in the fusiform region to face-pairs morphed at different levels of similarity. The idea is that the more similar face-pairs are, the more repetition suppression should be observed in the fusiform face area. Participants viewed the face-pairs under two different task instructions. The first task made face-pair similarity irrelevant. In this task, repetition suppression was observed to repeated faces. In the second task, face-pairs were made critical as participants had to make same-different judgments about the pairs. In this task, repetition suppression was eliminated.

The idea here is that in the same-different judgment task, the brain has to represent faces as distinctinctively as possible so that subtle morph differences can be detected. Thus, repetition suppression is prevented, possibly from executive function areas that process task instruction and exert a top-down modulatory control in the fusiform area.

The study also shows that there are individual differences in participants ability to exert this top-down modulation to regulate repetition suppression in the fusiform regions. This study was also performed in older adults, which will be reported in a subsequent research article. Briefly though, it is thought that older adults show declines in behavioral performance because of less distinctiveness in cognitive representations. This design is thus useful as a means to measure and related distinctinveness of representations in the brain and how that affects behavior.

VSS Conference Day 3: Illusion Night

Start of Illusion Night! This is an annual event where conference attendees submit their visual illusions for competition to see who's is the best. The top 10 are selected and show their exhibit here at Illusion Night. You can check out the illusions online [link]. The one that really wowed me was the curveball illusion, its the most dramatic one!

VSS Conference Day 3: Club car to beach

VSS Conference Day 3: Walking to the conference hotel

VSS Conference Day 2: Naples Grande

Touring the hotel lobby grounds.

VSS Conference Day 2: Poster session

Check out the poster session.