Boot camp! (Week Two)

Today was Boot Camp Day! Once we got to the lab things started off right away with helping to move tables for our boot camp presentations. Then some targets for the lab arrived(from France!) so we helped move those into the building as well. After that we started boot camp, which is just a crash course of everything related to the eye. Such as parts of the eye, how the eye moves, backgrounds on eye-tracking scientists, and equipment used to track the eye. Both Jeff and Andy were here today and the rest of the grad students attended the boot camp too, which was cool but I'm sure they had already heard of most of the stuff we talked about.

The Boot camp wasn't terrible, information wise but it was just really long. We did boot camp all morning broke for lunch and resumed afterwards until 5. We all took notes though so that will help in retaining some of the info. I ended up taking about 5 pages of notes. Also there was a part about action potential and depolarization, which I had learned about in Ap Bio so I was pretty excited that I knew at least one of the things they talked about beforehand. Jeff and Andy also gave each of the interns an assignment to look up before tomorrow. Mine was figuring out the the different wavelengths that the Macula Lutea filters out and find a graph showing it. The Macula Lutea is a filter that absorbs short wavelengths such as blue light.

We also talked about near-sighted and far-sighted people and what causes those conditions. We also talked about contacts, glasses, stigmatisms, which was interesting since they all related to my own eyes. After the anatomy of the eye they talked about the actual tracking of the eye and did cool experiments.

One thing brought up was that the smooth pursuit of the eyes can only happen if you follow an object otherwise the eyes just move in saccades. However, i was wondering if when you roll your eyes if they make a smooth pursuit or if they are saccades? He didn't know the answer to that so he wants me to try experimenting with the high speed camera which can capture if the eye is making a saccade or a smooth pursuit. I think this will be fun to experiment with especially since i'm a master at rolling my eyes :)