Literature Search

Yesterday midterms ended. That's right, yesterday. They were spread out over about 1/3 of the semester, which had definite ups and downs.

In any case, after an evening of remembering what free time felt like, today has been the day that I launch into literature searches for my end-of-semester projects. Two of my four classes have only projects and no final exams, so they need to be good. Luckily, they both promise to be really interesting as well.

In my working memory and general frontal-lobe stuff class, I'm trying to work up a proposal regarding forward modeling and prediction...basically, how parts of our brains learn what to expect, and what happens when expectations are violated. I think unexpected reward is at the basis of why we feel good when looking at or hearing certain things which are considered "beautiful", and this will hopefully help me get a better understanding of how that occurs.

For my course in vision models the project is perhaps a bit more ambitious - I'm doing the preliminary work for an experiment to look at the relationship between eye movement patterns when viewing visual artwork, EEG mismatch negativity (MMN) responses, and the rules of visual design which say certain things create tension and draw the eye. If tension involves the violation of expectations, then a visual MMN response should be generated, which could signal for attention and cause a saccade to the point which violated expectations. There are some really interesting papers already on this topic, which I'll try to post later on today.

It's fantastic to have time to explore this stuff again, and really go where I want to go instead of worrying about finishing a problem set or what I need to know for a test!