Sarah and I have been pounding out this intern project and making great headway. Our PowerPoint is a little crazy at the moment, but we hope to organize it by tomorrow. We found some great images thanks to Intern John and books like Altman's Development of the Human Spinal Cord. We are currently working on trying to get permission to use these images but have so far e-mailed two defunct addresses. Excellent.
Liz suggested possible topics for the comparative section of our project, including dolphin and whale brain composition and self-recognition in birds. The bird experiments involved putting a colored sticker on a bird without it noticing (how on earth they do this, we don't know...) and seeing if it tried to scratch off the sticker when looking in a mirror, thus confirming that it knew it was seeing itself. She also mentioned studies on a parrot that could form entire coherent sentences, so if you're into talking birds, get excited. Emily also told us about "theory of mind," regarding experiments done with chimps on awareness of others' knowledge. Basically this entails one chimp taking advantage of another if the first chimp knows his competitor doesn't know the location of a banana. Or something. We promise we will understand this in our project. Once we fix the eyesore of a PowerPoint presentation we hope to have better luck accessing resources for the second half of our project.
No comments:
Post a Comment