BlogVision to Memory: A High School Student Researches the Connection between Sight and Recollection
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The average adult human brain can hold about as much information as 15,000 desktop computers. The sheer capacity for memory inspired Alliyah Steele, a Harvard-bound high school researcher, to attempt to understand the brain.
Steele’s initial work focused specifically on memory and how the brain encodes information, but she lost contact with her first research mentor. “These professionals have a lot on their plate and don’t necessarily have the time,” she stated. Steele began searching for a new mentor by individually reaching out to professors with similar interests, and she eventually found someone willing to support her. Her new advisor focused more on vision and the brain than memory, so she modified her focus. Although it wasn’t her main interest, Steele was able to connect vision to her prior work: “I looked into visual recognition, and how past memory and familiarity interacts with that,” she said. The project was independent with support from her research mentor.
Finding a research mentor can be challenging, but having the advice and resources of a mentor is essential to conducting research. Steele was able to obtain a useful database from her mentor, which recorded the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from the brains of a few participants after viewing over 5,000 images. The database had been previously analyzed for understanding vision and the brain, but Steele applied it to her own work. “I added that extra variable of memory and familiarity which had never been looked at before,” she noted.
For those searching for research advising, Jinso is an innovative service connecting researchers to mentors. It makes the process easier by matching researchers globally based on interests, and showing students a list of experts open to mentorship to whom they can reach out. Starting research with a mentor drastically improves outcomes.
With access to the database, Steele was able to work digitally, using her knowledge of MATLAB for data analysis. Her first project focused on whether visual processing is affected by where one lives (rural, urban, or suburban). The following year, she discovered interesting findings by looking deeper into scenes and objects: “The lower levels of the visual cortex that we thought were just involved in rudimentary tasks, like recognizing colors or edges, might actually have roles in memory.” The study has applications in understanding navigation, Alzheimer’s therapy and diagnosis, and Schizophrenic visual hallucinations. Her findings were original, and she entered her paper into the Regeneron Science Talent Search.
Steele placed highly enough in the competition to be named a semifinalist (300 out of 1900), and she was further recommended for publication—a distinction given to only around 60 submissions. Her paper was later published in the E=mc2 Mathematical Science Journal at the University of Chicago.
Steele sees extensions to her work she plans to continue exploring, particularly by researching how visual processing is encoded as memory in the first place. Her understanding of the role of vision in memory has significant applications, including using pictorial approaches for teaching children struggling with learning disabilities. “Students can learn better visually… than just having things written out or hearing them firmly,” she shared.
GitHub is a popular platform used by computer scientists to manage their collaborative projects, but a similar program does not exist for academic work. There is no standard platform to create work, connect with others, and share work in one place. Most platforms only fall into one or two of these categories.The Jinso collaboration tool is a better way for groups to work on projects. By bringing the entire academic collaboration process onto one tool, it simplifies workflows and communication.The first steps for using the Jinso platform are:
Once a user builds a network, they can create new Groups that consist of their network members. By default, the creator of a group is the admin. The most common Group is a research group, but the platform can manage several other types of academic projects. Platform users can create study groups for sharing course materials or groups of club members for extracurricular work.The admin of the Group has the ability to add new members at any time.
Admins are also responsible for creating Projects within Groups.
A Project for a research group is usually a research paper, but Projects can also be other forms of documents that could benefit from discussion and revisions. Examples include study guides, business plans, articles, and essays. Each Group can have an unlimited number of Projects within it, and all Projects within a Group are shared among the same members.
Once a user builds a network, they can create new Groups that consist of their network members. By default, the creator of a group is the admin. The most common Group is a research group, but the platform can manage several other types of academic projects.
Platform users can create study groups for sharing course materials or groups of club members for extracurricular work.The admin of the Group has the ability to add new members at any time. Admins are also responsible for creating Projects within Groups.
A Project for a research group is usually a research paper, but Projects can also be other forms of documents that could benefit from discussion and revisions. Examples include study guides, business plans, articles, and essays. Each Group can have an unlimited number of Projects within it, and all Projects within a Group are shared among the same members.
When a new Project is created, an initial revision must be shared. This can either be plain text or a PDF.
The Project will be immediately visible to all Group members with the first revision shown. Group members can comment on the revision with questions or feedback, and others can reply to comments.When another revision of the paper has been completed, the Group admin can add a new revision to the same Project.
The revision will become visible above the prior revision, and it will have a new comment box associated with it. Projects make it simple to keep track of a paper’s entire revision history and discussions at each stage.
For each revision, Group admins can also create subtasks. Arrows allow Group members to view all of the different subtasks and comment on them individually. Subtasks allow a paper to be analyzed in unique components. For example, a research paper can have a unique subtask for each of its sections, and collaborators can discuss them all separately in the comment boxes. Jinso is a quicker way to collaborate on long-term projects. It makes it easier to connect, share, and manage the development of ideas and papers. You can create a Jinso account and start using the platform today for your research and academic needs at jinso.io.
The average adult human brain can hold about as much information as 15,000 desktop computers. The sheer capacity for memory inspired Alliyah Steele, a Harvard-bound high school researcher, to attempt to understand the brain.
Steele’s initial work focused specifically on memory and how the brain encodes information, but she lost contact with her first research mentor. “These professionals have a lot on their plate and don’t necessarily have the time,” she stated. Steele began searching for a new mentor by individually reaching out to professors with similar interests, and she eventually found someone willing to support her. Her new advisor focused more on vision and the brain than memory, so she modified her focus. Although it wasn’t her main interest, Steele was able to connect vision to her prior work: “I looked into visual recognition, and how past memory and familiarity interacts with that,” she said. The project was independent with support from her research mentor.
Finding a research mentor can be challenging, but having the advice and resources of a mentor is essential to conducting research. Steele was able to obtain a useful database from her mentor, which recorded the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from the brains of a few participants after viewing over 5,000 images. The database had been previously analyzed for understanding vision and the brain, but Steele applied it to her own work. “I added that extra variable of memory and familiarity which had never been looked at before,” she noted.
For those searching for research advising, Jinso is an innovative service connecting researchers to mentors. It makes the process easier by matching researchers globally based on interests, and showing students a list of experts open to mentorship to whom they can reach out. Starting research with a mentor drastically improves outcomes.
With access to the database, Steele was able to work digitally, using her knowledge of MATLAB for data analysis. Her first project focused on whether visual processing is affected by where one lives (rural, urban, or suburban). The following year, she discovered interesting findings by looking deeper into scenes and objects: “The lower levels of the visual cortex that we thought were just involved in rudimentary tasks, like recognizing colors or edges, might actually have roles in memory.” The study has applications in understanding navigation, Alzheimer’s therapy and diagnosis, and Schizophrenic visual hallucinations. Her findings were original, and she entered her paper into the Regeneron Science Talent Search.
Steele placed highly enough in the competition to be named a semifinalist (300 out of 1900), and she was further recommended for publication—a distinction given to only around 60 submissions. Her paper was later published in the E=mc2 Mathematical Science Journal at the University of Chicago.
Steele sees extensions to her work she plans to continue exploring, particularly by researching how visual processing is encoded as memory in the first place. Her understanding of the role of vision in memory has significant applications, including using pictorial approaches for teaching children struggling with learning disabilities. “Students can learn better visually… than just having things written out or hearing them firmly,” she shared.