My name is Martha Bawn.
I'm an undergraduate research assistant at the Bunge Lab at UC Berkeley.
Right now we're in the eye tracking lab in Tolman hall.
I'm from Boulder, Colorado.
My parents are both kind of science minded.
My mom grew up in Poland and she got the equivalent of a master's degree in physics over there.
When she came here in the 80's she worked as a computer programmer.
My dad is also a computer programmer and that's how they met.
In my household growing up it was always talking about science and new things that were going
on in really all fields of science.
In high school I learned a lot about cognitive science on my own just reading pop science
books.
That kind of thing.
When I came here to Berkeley cognitive science was the major that I chose.
It was a really great thing because here you take classes in a lot of different disciplines.
Psychology, neuroscience, computer science, philosophy.
That really broadened my perspective.
Specifically with this lab I applied for a research position through the program with
the university.
I just applied to the three most interesting labs and this was the one that caught my attention
because it's using this eye tracking technology which is almost like mind reading.
It's a really cool thing that you can use for a lot of different purposes so I thought
it would be really good to learn that kind of technique that I could apply to lots of
different problems.
In the study that I'm working on now with the eye tracker we're asking people to solve
these little puzzles.
Afterward we ask them "How did you solve this puzzle?"
They just write it down.
It turns out people are really bad at doing that.
They don't know the process that they're mind is taking.
The cool thing about the eye tracker is that we can see specifically what parts they're
looking at in what order.
We can see the strategy that they're using.
But they don't actually consciously know that.
Just last week or so we finished the process of getting the data into a useable form.
When it comes out of the eye tracker it's hundreds of thousands of lines of just numbers.
You can't really tell anything from that.
It took us months, I guess, to get that into the software and get a visual representation
of that data.
We're just starting to look at that visual representation and it looks like our hypothesis
is at least applicable.
We're actually seeing different strategies that people are using to solve the problems
and we can separate those strategies out based on the eye tracking data.
I think the only thing that was randomized was whether the correct answer was this one
or that one.
I've learned so much.
I've only been here six months or so but I've learned a lot about the nitty gritty of putting
together and experiment.
Everything from making a list of all the variables you have to control for.
Writing the actual code that collects the data and then processing that data so that
it's usable.
I'm learning a lot about just the programming and the statistics and the designing the experiment
that I don't think is really taught in classes.
The study is showing that practicing your reasoning skills can apply to lots of different
kinds of problems that involve that reasoning skills.
I think actually doing something, getting your hands dirty, it's not just getting better
at that one specific thing.
It can actually change the way you're think and the way you approach problems.
Specifically this lab people seem really excited about the kinds of questions they're asking
and not just the ones they're working on but everybody's.
I really like how people get involved with each other's projects.
The environment in the lab is one where everybody continually wants to learn and ask new questions
and take things further than they are taken now.
That's absolutely the kind of environment that I want to work in.