My name is Jillian Sullivan.
We are at the CBS Lab, the Computational Behavioral Science Lab at Northeastern University and
I am a new post-doctoral fellow here.
I study autism, definitely an autism researcher now and that came about purely through my
work as an undergrad student studying it.
I was fascinated by autism because A, it's such a mystery.
I think I'm always drawn to things that are unsolved and you know that we want to find
the answers for but I also really like the [constuation?] of traits that we see in autism.
The fact that there are some difficulties and weaknesses and some struggles in a lot
of areas especially areas that I find so automatically easy to do.
But much more so I like the interesting patterns of strengths that we see.
Things that you wouldn't necessarily expect to come from what we always are calling a
disorder and I really think that was what drew me into it.
I wanted to know not only why these children and adults were struggling with certain things
but why they were doing so beautifully, so profoundly well on other aspects of life.
We've created a system.
It's a video capture system combined with some time synchronized portable psychophysiology
tools that mass skin conductance and sleep measures.
I'm looking at how we can actually put these in kids' homes for a while to see if we can
break down that forth wall.
We bring kids into a clinic and we expect that we're going to get as much as we can
out of the hour that they're there at the clinic but that's not them.
That's not life, this, you know, it's absolutely not ecologically valid.
So we're trying to bring this into homes to see if we can capture both research and for
clinical and diagnosing purposes of a bigger picture of what kids' strengths and weaknesses
are and how they might relate to their physiological and their sleep patterns.
We are also working on a mother baby study and some couples studies so we can have people
interact together so we can have physiological and behavioral work together over times seeing
how, you know, if the baby is upset, is the mother also upset and can the mother calm
the baby down by regulating her own body signs and body language.
How does this work?
[Speaker 2]: So what we can set up, is we can take a, we can have a video camera in
the classroom where we're focusing on the kid.
We can have sensors so he's got a three axis accelerometer amp [CROSSTALK] which is sensors.
So if it's on a known limb at a known orientation, then I know where his limb is in three dimensional
space.
[Speaker 1]: Psychology is the human experience.
What makes us human.
What especially I like is what makes us social beings.
I can do statistics on it and run studies and look at it or I can write poetry about
it.
There's not that much of a difference in the end.
And I enjoy thinking about how to design a study and how to find the answers.
But I enjoy it because I want to find the answers.
I do the statistics because I want to find the answers.
It's that designing the question and answering the question that I think is so interesting
and that can be any question and that can be almost any answer.
I think that the best ideas come from interactions especially over.
Some days we literally just talk.
We design studies and we talk about different applications.
We talk about different ways we could address the question.
Different questions we could ask.
How we could do it and there's no way that I could of come up with that on my own.
He probably wouldn't either.
It's in the merging of our ideas, merging of different connections between different
areas of science and psychology and even technology now that I'm in a small technology focused
lab.
Think closely about what it is you're interested in within those creative endeavors, within
those artistic endeavors.
If it's the human you're interested in, it's only going to help anything you do to have
a better understanding of the human.
So regardless of whether you're going to end up in your English or your creative arts or
any field, it's worth just picking up something on psychology, anything and getting a better
idea of what is going on with the human.
It's not all science.
It's not all wet lab; it's all not rats if you don't want it be.
It can be pulling together different subjects, finding old archaic journals, finding old
articles about something, pulling it all together into a new theory, new idea and if that's
something that interests you then psychology and science is the way forward for you.