Let's Talk About It -- Week 3

In the SLG lab we continued our quest for genes that could affect dyslexia (dsx) or speech impairment (si).

After searching two articles (“Genome-Wide Analyses of Working Memory Ability: a review” and “Understanding Language from a Genomic Perspective”), my lab partner Karishma and I highlighted any genes mentioned in the papers. Once we’d compiled a list, we checked the mentioned genes against our own data, flagging where patients with dsx or si showed deletions of duplication in these mentioned genes.

Despite our (>15000!!) lines in the spreadsheet mapping the chromosomal regions of the tested patients, we only discovered three genes with direct overlaps: COMT, SCN1, BCAS3. Six genes with nearly overlapped the mentioned regions, just close enough to still factor into our study.

As the head of the lab, Dr. Peter, left for Seattle on Wednesday, Karshima and I couldn’t begin searching for point mutations because neither of us had any clue what we were doing. With Dr. Peter back on Tuesday, we will begin investigating the data more deeply – especially data from dsx and si patients – for possible occurrences of point mutations in DNA. But due to

Dr. Peter’s absence, most of my work in week 3 occurred in the CHILLL lab.

On Tuesday I continued playing the POWWER computer game and finally learned what POWWER – the name of the computer game and our current study – stands for.

Profiles

Of

Working memory and

Word learning for

Educational

Research

Which makes sense, as the game is meant to test not only a child’s working memory, but also their language learning skills and reaction times.

After Tuesday, I’d learned enough of the POWWER game to begin testing myself without an RA present. I spent all day Thursday playing the game alone as both student and administrator. Being alone allowed me to take more pictures! So here’s me set up like a student would be to play the game:

In order to complete the trials, students press the touchscreen, record their responses in the microphone, or hit specific buttons on the key board. In order to accurately measure reaction time, students must return their hand to the green circle between each answer. In addition, two pieces of fishing wire attached to the touchscreen allow a consistent measurement of how far the green circle and the student are from the screen. All these added steps ensure higher accuracy when measuring results. 

Because I’ve now completed each of the tasks several times, I have a good idea as to how exactly the game functions.

Working memory tasks are fairly straightforward. Children hear a series of letters or numbers, or perhaps see a string of atypical polygons, and must repeat the information back. While these tasks aren’t simple, how they work and what they’re meant to test is easy to understand.

Most fascinating to me are the word learning exercises. On Sea Monster Island, for example, I was faced with four different “monsters,” each looking something like:

To ensure the students were truly learning the information and not just recalling facts, each monster was given a mashup of sounds as a name. Students had to be able to say the monster names, recognize the names when said, and match each name with each monster. As if this wasn't hard enough, the trials on the island also included recreating what each monster looks like!

I chose from four categories of details in an attempt to recreate the monster's exact features. After one or two rounds, the tasks became much easier.

Thanks to my now thorough understanding of the POWWER game, on Friday, I accompanied graduate student Melissa Sacchetta to a charter school in Chandler, where one sixth grade student had signed up to participate in the study. Melissa and I spent an hour in the schools only empty room - a robotics laboratory - assessing the participant's vision and hearing, as well as administering three separate kinds of intelligence tests. 

The first of these tests asked the student to form a sentence given a word and a picture to include. One such example was a picture of two children standing in front of a closed toy store in which the student was instructed to form a sentence with the word "until." Melissa and I wrote down each sentence and separately scored them, a "2" for a perfect sentence, "1" for a flawed but permissible sentence, and "0" for a lack of attempt, sentence that didn't make sense, or sentence without referencing the picture. Later we compared our scores in a process called "double scoring" to ensure neither of us made a mistake in our grading of the sentences. 

The next test assessed the students ability to solve word puzzles. When presented with a questions such as "what has a tail and barks?" students must answer "dog." While these puzzles appeared easy at first, the riddles became progressively more difficult to the point where I was impressed at the sixth grader's ability to answer! 

The final test was one I remember from elementary school in which the student read a series of unrelated words as quickly as possible, attempting to fit as many in to 45 seconds as he could. 

We perform all these tests to ensure each participant will fall within the first standard deviation of "intelligence" for children of this age before they begin the POWWER game. Now with this experience under my belt, I'm ready to travel and prepare more students for our research in the CHILLL lab!