By: Lauryn Murray, Mary Falade, Rachel Zhou, and Christine Seo
Name: Marcus Chung
Major: Psychology
Year: 4
Home Town: Malaysia
Preferred pronouns: He/him
Fun Fact: My very first time extracting my wisdom tooth, the entire procedure was actually filmed and used for education and training purposes for dentistry.
Could you give us a short overview of your directed studies project? Starting off with your research topic?
What our lab is interested in is how attention plays a role in gating the emotional penetrability of visually guided movements. Specifically the two-visual system hypothesis. There’s the ‘what’ and also there’s the ‘where’ pathway. The ‘where’ pathway is theorized to be under the dorsal stream, and the dorsal stream, in theory, is impenetrable. For example, if I’m trying to grab my phone and my phone suddenly moves, my brain should automatically correct that movement, this is called the “automatic pilot”. In our study, we tested the hypothesis that visually guided movements can be gated by the role of attention in reacting to high emotional stimuli – i.e. snakes! What if the human is scared of this stimulus? If the dorsal stream is impenetrable, individuals could be able to reach and point to the stimuli that they are scared of when testing the ‘automatic pilot’. If we are able to test patients who are actually afraid of snakes or spiders and allow them to interact with these things that they are afraid of, then that’s an additional way to expose them to these stimuli and hopefully desensitize them of that fear. As this was a pilot study we were also trying to test out other observations that were under the two visual system hypothesis.
What sparked your interest in your research topic and how did you build your hypothesis? Was there anyone who inspired you to look into this topic?
I’ve been working at a lab called Vision Lab under Dr. Jim Enns since second year, when I was a research assistant for them. A lot of the time we would have these meetings and we’d talk about our research interests, and post-doc and grad students would give their insights. I was always very keen on taking down notes on what they were doing and what they were interested in. I never really had an interest in mind in the very beginning, I was feeding off different ideas of grad students. Jim was very nice to me and he introduced me to a post-doc researcher named Robert Whitwell. We got to talking about his previous experiments that were done on spiders. It was very interesting. I loved the hypothesis, and I was excited to assist him in changing to a different type of emotional stimuli. We used snakes instead, because snakes on their own were theorized to be processed under the ‘low road’ hypothesis through the pulvinar nucleus – a group of cells inside the thalamus which has reciprocal connections with sensory modalities, snakes can actually directly influence your attention without us perceiving it. So snakes in comparison to spiders, maybe could have a higher emotional influence on our visually guided movements. Mainly, it was the post doc students and myself talking about the things we were interested in, and we kind of came up with the hypothesis over the summer.
What made you feel like this was an important topic to research?
There are two reasons. One is that with cognitive neuroscience, a lot of times we just want to find out what the brain does. What is it? What’s consciousness? The second one, a very interesting one, is that a lot of clinical psychologists use exposure therapy. When a person is scared of something, they expose them to it and hopefully desensitize their fear. But a lot of times they don’t actually include for the person to accurately interact with the object or stimuli that they are scared about, without them really freaking out. So if our hypothesis is true, it essentially means that the patient will be able to interact with something that they’re afraid of and hopefully that is able to be included in that exposure therapy process in the future.
What was your favourite part of the process?
Analyzing the data. Honestly, this was the most fun way of seeing your hypothesis and everything come into play. I think 70% of research comes from your data, so analyzing it with Rob was always fun. We celebrate nice numbers, but obviously if there are no good numbers we have to accept it. So overall, just seeing the data form into something great is always so rewarding. We were able to record a huge data set filled with different variables, and running correlations to see its effectiveness were always so fun for me to witness and execute.
Is there anything you can share with us about the results that you found? What trends/conclusions did you observe?
The study is still on-going, but one of the few things that really interested us was that high-fear individuals, who were really hard to find, actually did better on the dual task (a task that involved an additional letter identification on top of the reaching task, where participants had to point to the stimulus they were afraid of) than low-fear individuals. So with the low-fear individuals, we didn’t see much change in pointing reaction in both the dual task and the single task (which only involved reaching). Meanwhile, the high-fear individuals in the dual task were able to interact with the emotional stimuli better. So Rob and I were surprised, but we decided to do more testing. But essentially, that single finding triangulates with the spider study that Rob did previously. So we were very excited about that.
What was the most surprising observation from your study?
Well the most surprising was the high-fear individuals performing better in the dual-task, but it’s also that this performance also led them to doing worse in the dual task condition. So under the dual-task, they are actually worse at identifying the letter first, but were doing better on the reach in negative stimuli. We can loosely conclude that high-fear individuals may be putting more attentional resources on that task because of the fear, and allowing them to do better.
What will you be doing with your data and conclusion now? How do you plan on presenting it?
There’s always a chance for us DS students to give presentations internally to our lab, based on our pilot findings. In the future, we plan on presenting for the next PURC. But I think right now, our paper would go into Rob’s hands to publish, which is one of the main things we want to do. But future PURCs and MURCs are always an option.
How do you see the results of your study being applied in the real world?
Clinical psychologists will be able to enhance their exposure therapy method in a way that allows patients to interact with their fears. Specifically, we would have to apply a cognitive load, where their visual system is not just fixated on the fear but at the same time, they are interacting with it.
If you could do your study again, what would you do differently and why?
One of the main things I would do differently is the recruiting stage. Because of the nature of our quasi-experimental study, it would be better to seek participants with high levels of fears on a platform other than HSP that pays people around Greater Vancouver. The platform reserve would be able to reach a broader population beyond just UBC students.
What course(s) do you think were most helpful in gaining background knowledge about your research topic?
Definitely all the statistics courses. 218 and 359 for advanced stats, these courses really allow you to get into the nitty gritty analysis stuff of psychology. A lot of people might think that’s very daunting, but that’s basically the bread and butter of psych. Once you are really good at analyzing data, the research itself honestly just comes and flows very smoothly.
Yeah, that would make a lot of sense. How has managing your project helped you grow, both personally and professionally?
Managing my project definitely helped me realize that creativity is very important. To build or to design some type of experiment that tests cognitive functions, you have to be really creative. Allowing yourself to fully think about something without any restriction is very important for coming up with experiments. I guess that would be the first one. My second one is organizing everything: backing up drives, organizing data, cleaning data, putting everything into order. The conscientious part of you — you’re kind of training that muscle. The last thing you want is a complete mess of data. Those are the two things I would say.
Tell us about how you stay organized and manage your time while doing an directed studies project. How do you prioritize? How do you motivate yourself?
I put this project as my top priority because I would regret it in the future if I didn’t devote all the time to this project. By setting courses aside and focusing on the DS project, I could fully dive into each of every concept and be specific in every detail. I truly see this research as my child so it intrinsically motivates me to stay organized by backing up drives, organizing data, cleaning data, and putting everything into order. The conscientious part of you — you’re kind of training that muscle. The last thing you want is a complete mess of data.
What was the most challenging part about doing a directed studies project? What was most rewarding?
The most challenging part lies in the exceptions, when some participants do not follow the instructions well and just want the credit. You had to really clarify the instructions and engage them in our study. On the flip side, when you do nail down everything, the rewarding part is you get really beautiful results. So I guess it goes hand in hand.
How do you network within the psychology community, and where have you made your most valuable connections?
I think the best way to network within psychology is talking to your professors. It’s better to schedule a one-on-one office hour instead of going to a group session since you can get a lot of time to connect with them and their research that way. Most importantly, networking without an objective in mind is important, you really want to get to know these professors personally, to build a true connection with them. One of my most valuable connections I made was actually speaking with a TA. Luckily, he was a grad student working under the vision lab and he was able to grant me a position in the lab, where I met a lot of different individuals. That is when you start meeting a lot of people – supervisors, grad students, fellow research assistants.
What are your other interests outside of Psychology? Are you a part of any clubs or teams?
One of my main interests would be sports. That has always been really fun for me and allows me to get into this mindful state. I do a lot of golf and tennis. There were a few clubs that allowed us to do that, but not varsity level. Every now and then we’d go to the golf course, to the driving range and just play. I am also HR chair for BizChina, and not only helped transition our team towards an online based platform but also helped with leadership alignment and change management.
What are your professional goals and plans for the future? What do you see yourself doing in 5 years time? 10 years time?
My short term goal is to excel in my grad studies and hopefully be able to work in a tech firm or financial services specializing in HR data analytics. I’m taking an unconventional route towards psychology as I personally believe psychology in and of itself has many transferable skills in other industries. I won’t be going down the PhD path. I’m going down the organizational psychology path. I’ll be going to London and attending a Master’s program in either Kings or UCL on organizational psychology. Hopefully after I’m done with that I can join a company and help human capital related problems with the utilization of data and research. My ten year goal is to build a startup based on human capital consulting for private businesses with the utilization of IO psychology research. Any type of human related problem in a company, I primarily believe that psychologists can help the most, even with assisting HR professionals. It’s to do with people and we understand people. It’s a different edge of consulting in a company: a different lens to look at problems in a company, problems that are solely rooted in the most important asset of the company – its workforce. I really want to build a startup to help companies with that.