Herbert E. Carter Travel Award Summary

Kelly N. Brooks
Ph.D. Candidate
Physiological Sciences GIDP

Society for Neuroscience 35th Annual Meeting
Washington, DC
November 12 -16, 2005

Attending this conference was a very beneficial and humbling experience for me. I gained invaluable experience and feedback from other researchers in my area and was able to explore other interesting areas of neuroscience that are less familiar to me. Over the five days of the conference, I saw multiple interesting talks and posters, attended a special lecture given by the Dalai Lama of Tibet, presented my research, and received excellent suggestions from colleagues that I plan to use as I continue my research.

Many of the posters that I saw focused on recognition memory, object and face recognition, and eye movements as all three of these areas are relevant to my research. Through my interactions with others in these areas, I learned how they use numerous behavioral tasks to test recognition memory of monkeys for objects, faces, complex scenes, dynamic stimuli (movies), and abstract three-dimensional stimuli. Some tasks require much more intensive training of the animal than others, which can lead to over-exposure of the animal to the stimuli prior to testing conditions and confound the results of a study. I was able to ask questions about these tasks and gained invaluable insight for my own work that I could not have otherwise received if I was not at this conference. I also learned how other researchers record looking data (eye movements) in awake, behaving monkeys, and I was reassured that the method we chose to use in our laboratory is excellent for our purposes.

In addition to seeing posters, I attended a mini-symposium entitled “Faces, Voices, and the Neuroethology of Primate Behavior.” This series of talks was very interesting to me as the subject matter focused on the visual and auditory signals used by humans and non-human primates in guiding their social behavior. There were five speakers in this primate social cognition series. I really enjoyed the manner in which this session integrated data collected from behavioral, neurophysiological, neuroanatomical, and neuroimaging studies because it allowed me to think how data collected in our laboratory contributes to a greater understanding of social cognition for all researchers in this area.

In the “Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society” series, the Dalai Lama of Tibet gave a special talk on the neuroscience of meditation. Western neuroscience has shown that practicing meditation changes neural states in circuits that may be important for emotional regulation and compassionate behavior. He emphasized that compassion is an important human value and essential for living a whole life. Moreover, he discussed the importance of current neuroscience research in exploring the neural basis of emotion and promoting mental well-being. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed his talk because the long-term goal of our laboratory is to understand the neural basis of normal and pathological emotions.

On the final day of the conference, I attended a wonderful lecture given by Dr. Nicky Clayton from the University of Cambridge that challenged the claim that only humans have episodic memory. She presented results from her laboratory suggesting that scrub-jays can recall what food item they cached, where, and when it was cached on the basis of a single trial. She not only showed results suggesting that scrub-jays recalled past events, but these results also suggested that scrub-jays are flexible in their caching methods and can anticipate future events such as spoiling and stealing of food items. I was amazed at how these animals changed their caching behavior in the presence of an observer scrub-jay and also how, based on prior personal experience in stealing, these animals re-cached their food items yet naïve animals did not.

Although I benefited greatly from seeing various talks and posters, presenting my own research was truly an incredible experience for me. This was my first time presenting my work at a conference, and I was pleased with how well received my poster was by others. My poster was titled “novelty preference in visual paired comparison tasks in monkeys is based on view-invariant face recognition.” During a four-hour session, I presented my research and spoke one-on-one with other researchers about my work. I received numerous good questions and suggestions as to how I could expand upon my results in future studies. I came away from my poster presentation with many new, interesting ideas for future experiments that I plan to perform in the spring semester.

In summary, I had a wonderful time attending this conference because I not only learned from others in my area of research but also learned about other interesting neuroscience research with which I am less familiar. I would like to thank the Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs Advisory Council (GIDPAC) for selecting me as a recipient of the Herbert Carter Fellowship and providing the funding that made my experience at this conference possible