These assignments move teaching to the outside world by driving the student to recruit subjects, gather information, create stimuli, and test subjects. Subjects will be scanned in an fMRI during presentation of various stimuli, and the areas of the brain that show increased activity will be recorded and analyzed.
Assignment 1
Use the participant’s journals and diaries to create stimuli that will elicit the participant’s memory of specific events when he/she sees them inside the scanner.
Assignment 2
Interview participants’ friends or family members to ask them about remote events that the participant experienced.
Assignment 3
Assist in scanning at MGH/MIT/HMS Martinos Center.
Assignment 4
Administer tests to the participants that assess attention, mental imagination, and vocabulary.
Assignment 5
Design a flyer to recruit potential volunteers. The flyers are distributed at places where our target population (interested 30- to 60-year-old subjects) would be. These places included libraries, book clubs, historical societies, restaurants that host poem readings, graduate schools and dorms at MIT and Harvard, etc.
Assignment 6
Read related fMRI and episodic memory articles.
Final Paper
Produce a final paper describing Experiments 1, 2, and 3. The paper should include introduction, materials, methods, results, and discussion for each experiment, as well as a final discussion of the significance of the three experiments together. The paper should be 15-20 pages long, double spaced.
