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In this episode of The Highlights, we’re joined by Patricia Hoyos, a graduate student in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI). We discuss her work on the development of spatial biases in school-aged kids, the challenges and perks of working with children, and her experiences transitioning her work from undergraduate independent work to a graduate project.
Brains, Black Holes, and Beyond (B Cubed) is a collaborative project between The Daily Princetonian and Princeton Insights. The show releases 3 episodes monthly: one longer episode as part of the Insights partnership, and two shorter episodes independently created by the 'Prince.' This show is produced by Senna Aldoubosh '25 under the 147th Board of the 'Prince.' Insights producers are Crystal Lee, Addie Minerva, and Thiago Tarraf Varella. This show is a reimagined version of the show formerly produced as Princeton Insights: The Highlights under the 145th Board of the 'Prince.'
Please direct pitches and questions to podcast@dailyprincetonian.com, and any corrections to corrections@dailyprincetonian.com.
[Theme music plays]
Thiago: Hi everyone! My name is Thiago and I'm a graduate student at Princeton University, and I am your host. The Highlights is a sister podcast to Princeton Insights in collaboration with The Daily Princetonian. Insights is a newsletter written by Princeton undergrads, grad students, and postdocs. We write about the most exciting groundbreaking research being conducted here at Princeton in the form of short, fun, easy to read reviews. We cover a range of topics including psychology, neuroscience, biology, computer science, and physics to name a few. Make sure to check out our website at insights.princeton.edu. Right now I'll receive my great cohort mate, Crystal Lee! Say hi!
Crystal: Hi, everyone! My name is Crystal and I'm a second year graduate student at Princeton and Thiago's cohort mate.
T: Nice! So today, we're talking with Patricia Hoyos. Patricia was born and raised in New Jersey and was an undergraduate at Princeton. She has wanted to study neuroscience since she was in high school and fortunately, neuroscience became a major at Princeton during her sophomore year. She joined Dr. Sabine Kastner's lab during her junior year, to study how attention develops in children and completed her undergraduate thesis with Dr. Kastner. She found her passion for research working on Dr. Kastner's kids project. She subsequently became a research assistant in the Kastner lab, where she worked closely with Dr. Na Yeon Kim, a former graduate student in the lab, and undergraduates Debby Cheng and Abigail Finkelston, to study how spatial attention develops in school-aged children. She then became a graduate student in the Princeton Neuroscience Program and has just completed her first year. She is planning to continue researching how the brain develops with Dr. Sabine Kastner, and Jesse Gomez. Some fun facts about her are that she has different roles in a bunch of different schools of martial arts, so be careful with her, and enjoys watching Korean variety shows. So now let's hear from her. How are you doing Patricia?
Patricia: I'm doing great, thank you for having me. I'm really excited for this!
T: So could you describe your journey to being where you are now?
P: Sure! So like I said, I was born and raised in New Jersey. I was an undergrad at Princeton and I knew I wanted to study the brain. And at that point, there was no major for neuroscience when I first joined, so I was thinking of MOL bio, or something of the sort. But very fortunately, it became a major and I joined Dr. Sabina Kastner's lab to do my independent work for both my junior year and senior years. And I was mentored by Na Yeon Kim, who is an amazing graduate student who just graduated this past year. And, I received a lot of guidance from so many different people and worked with lots of interesting scientists on these questions that are very poorly studied. I would say there's lots of questions still in the field of developmental neuroscience. So it's part of what excites me the most. But like you said, I've just completed my first year and had a class with you Thiago, this past year.
T: We did!
P: So, I'm looking forward to the rest of my graduate career. Nice.
C: That's awesome. And it sounds like you've had really, you've already had a really long journey into science starting, you know, wanting to be a scientist in high school and being able to be a neuroscience Ph.D. student now. But considering your general career in science this far, how has your work life changed since COVID? Has it been really different?
P: Well, I'm a bit of a night owl. So this was kind of perfect in the sense that I set my own schedule, when everything was remote, except for classes, I would say. Part of the reason I wanted to come to Princeton besides it's like, awesome resources, and it's such a great university is that my family lives in New Jersey. And so going back to see them pretty often also helped me in the more difficult moments, I would say.
C: With the stress and stuff, yeah?
P: Right, exactly.
T: Research wise did it change much?
P: Research wise, I continued working on some of the projects that I was working on with Na Yeon and Sabine. So it was a pretty, the transition was more easy, I would say, or more smooth than it could have been. And the lab culture is very supporting, and as we know, Princeton's culture is also very supporting. So it worked out very well for me, and I'm pretty grateful for that.
C: That's awesome.
T: Nice. Yeah, I'm glad. So you mentioned that you've been working with Dr. Na Yeon [Kim]. So could you just tell us a little bit more how this collaboration came about? I know that you are from the same lab but, for example, how did you distribute what work each person would do?
P: Yeah, so when I met Na Yeon she was in her third year and I was in my junior year, and so a lot of it was her teaching me how to do things in general. And she taught me how to do fMRI recordings and just basic things of analyses. But for this particular project, we were also working with two undergrads, Debby Cheng and Abigail Finkelston. And they did a lot of work on this project for their senior theses. And so there were two main studies or experiments that were part of the study, Debbie Cheng took real leadership. And the second part of the study, which was all about how spatial attention development correlates with reading fluency. And so that was her main focus and Na Yeon and I worked a lot on the on that project, helping her and a lot of the prior part, which is just the general development of spatial attention, and children. And we worked a lot together with the community as well. So to get all of these children involved, we had to work with schools in the area, with parents in the area, inviting them to our lab. So it was a really collaborative process. I think everyone did a little bit of everything.
T: That's nice! You mentioned now about spatial attention, so I think we could get into the paper. Can you explain what is spatial attention or spatial bias? That's something you mentioned a lot in the paper as well. And how does it affect our daily lives?
P: Yeah, so visual spatial attention is your ability to take in information from a particular part of space. And so it's been studied classically a lot with people who've had lesions, and because of those lesions, get visual-spatial hemi-neglect, so they won't be able to attend to things in a certain part of space. So often, these people will apply makeup to half their face, or eat food from only half of the plate and stuff like that. So that's where the term came from. But future research following that discovered that people without lesions or such extreme cases of neglect also have very slight spatial biases to the left or to the right, so there's a slight bias to attending to information slightly to the left or the right side of the midpoint. And so this has been correlated with your frontoparietal attention networks and how they work with each other, linked specifically to the theory of inter-hemispheric competition, where basically, the right side of your brain attends to the left side of space, and the left side of your brain attends to the right side of space, and they compete with each other and balance each other out. But this is not always perfect, which yields these very small biases, in most of us.
C: Gotcha. You mentioned previously that there's a lot of unanswered questions in sort of, like, the developmental neuroscience field. And so maybe you could talk about why it's important to study the development of spatial biases just as a whole. Like why, even though we know about visual lesions in adults, what is to be gained by studying spatial biases in children?
P: Yeah, one of our major motivations in doing this is that there have been papers that have come out that have tried to characterize ADHD or other neurodevelopmental disorders based on deviations in spatial biases. However, lots of those studies either had the motor version of the task where children were asked to bisect it [the line] with their hands. And as we know, children still have developing motor systems. Or they had a variance in group size, maybe there wasn't a control group, and so we thought that in order to make sound conclusions like this, we need to know how the general population's spatial bias develops. And so this is why we collected this from such a large cohort, and we were agnostic to any labels. So it's, you're trying to get a very diverse sample that is representative of the general population.
C: Gotcha, gotcha. So it, like, will inform how you think about spatial biases just as a whole?
P: Yeah, exactly. And then future studies that might want to delve into this, characterizing things like ADHD and reading disorder, now have something to compare to, or something relative to look at the results.
T: Cool. You already mentioned briefly, how do you measure spatial biases. But could you say specifically in your case, in your project, what you did?
P: Yes, so we had this computer game that showed participants a pre-bisected line. So a pre-bisected line is a horizontal line with a small vertical line bisecting it at some point on it. They were asked either which side is longer or which side is shorter, and participants were asked to designate this with pressing keys on the keyboard. And so throughout any single participant's experiment, they were asked only which is shorter or which is longer, so as to not lead to confusion, but after a few, like 80, measurements of this, we were able to derive the participant's subjective midpoint where they believe the midpoint to be relative to the actual midpoint.
C: Very cool. I feel like it would be really bad at that task.
[All laugh]
P: It gets hard. There's like a certain point where it feels like it's guessing
C: Implicit tasks like this, they just mess with you. But you also included a reading comprehension task, right, with Debbie Chang? Maybe you could go into, like, how you chose this task and what it actually is measuring?
P: Right, yeah, so the tasks that we used is the RAN, it stands for rapid automatized naming. And it basically is a test where children or participants have to rapidly name letters or numbers subsequently in a row from left to right, and they're timed on it. And this is a measure that has been used a lot before to test reading fluency. And so the goal of using this particular one is that it's easy and good for children to understand. But it's also very effective and standardized, so that we can get some sort of measure of how the spatial bias is interacting with reading fluency development.
T: I also have a question that is still in the methods, but it's a little off the record. So can you tell me about a time when something went wrong in an experiment, like you're working with a lot of children, so I assume that there must be something going on? Like, what is the most difficult part about working with children?
P: Well, when you're working with children, you have to make it fun for them, and also take into account different abilities or desires to like complete the experiment. So it was very much about being excited with them. And especially for the younger children, if they felt that it was too difficult, Na Yeon and I would go back and make the setting of the game a little bit easier, and not pressure them at all. So there were some kids that just did one round, and they were like, "we don't want to do this anymore", which is completely fine. Like they gave us some other time, which we're already grateful for. But I would say actually, like, working with children kind of makes me more excited about science, because they're just like, "Whoa, this is so cool!" So, it's fun. It's fun, yeah.
T: Oh, that's really cute. So if I, if I participated in your task right now, would I show a lot of bias? Like you mentioned, it's a very hard task, but how hard it is?
P: Well, it gets harder as you get better, is the thing. So like, if you do lots of correct answers, it gets closer and closer to the midpoint. So it gets harder in that sense. But you know, you always get a smiley face after each round, so it doesn't make you feel bad.
[All laugh]
C: We need that!
T: Yeah
P: Yeah! I found that I have a slightly rightward bias, and other people in my lab have a slightly leftward bias. So yeah, I mean, if you ever want to try it...
T: Yes, that would be fun! And how about the kids? Is the bias strong for them?
P: So we found that for the younger kids grades 1–3, they had a significantly leftward bias from the midpoint, although almost everyone we collected had a slightly leftward shifted bias. But only the children from grades 1–3 were significantly different from zero towards the left.
C: And thinking about your results, concerning like leftward bias and reading, like a portion of your paper says that maybe it's your leftward bias that helps you with your reading ability when you're learning to read, do you think, could you maybe elaborate on that and talk about like, what might be the mechanism that underlies this relationship?
P: Yeah, so this is, this is another one of those areas of developmental neuroscience that not a lot is known. But part of what led to this conclusion is that having a leftward bias and reading from left to right might be beneficial in resetting and going to the beginning of the page and your eyes scanning from left to right. But this has also been, I think, on the minds of previous researchers who have tried to find a link between spacial bias and reading disorder are people with dyslexia and other studies have found that participants with dyslexia have slightly less of a leftward bias. So although we would have to explore this in the future, it seems like there might be something there and one of our lab's future directions to try to get at this is we're collaborating with a lab in Israel to see if children who are learning to read from right to left will have a different developmental trajectory. So this would really get at that question, but it's one of those things that still needs a lot of research.
T: Nice! I also had something on my mind when I read your paper that was about Chomsky, because Chomsky has this theory of universal grammar that says that humans have an innate component that facilitates our ability to learn language. This seems to be in line with the idea that the bias would facilitate the learning. Do you agree? Do you think it makes sense?
P: Well, we saw that the significant leftward bias exists mostly in children grades 1–3, and then it becomes more normalized or adult-like, closer to zero, as they get older. So we think that the reason that it's significantly leftward during the time where children are getting exposed to reading on a higher level, or really getting a lot of formal schooling and reading, is because reading itself is a super difficult cognitive task. Humans being able to read is pretty awesome and involves a lot of the brain. But then once it becomes more automatic, the brain might normalize because in everyday life and for survival, it's better to have a balanced spatial bias. So it might be one of those things that, it takes on this really difficult cognitive task. And then once it's become automatized, enough, the brain opts for a more balanced spatial bias.
C: So do you think that infants then have no spatial bias?
P: That's a good question. I think, another thing that needs to be researched a lot more. Yeah, I would be excited to read any study that came out like that.
C: It'd be interesting, because maybe you start with no spatial bias, and then you see this U-shaped bias.
P: Mhm, but then, yeah, it's like, it's very interesting, like what babies are exposed to, and what they see their parents doing, how much that might affect it. There's lots of cool things out there, but yeah.
C: For sure! And on that topic, is there any sort of follow up to these results beyond the collaboration with the lab in Israel that you and your lab are working on or anything you're excited about?
P: Yeah, so pre-COVID times Na Yeon, Dr. Na Yeon Kim was collecting a lot of MRI scans from people coming into the lab and who also had spatial bias measures. And so, like I said in the beginning, spatial bias measures have been correlated with activity in the frontoparietal attention network in adults. And so seeing how this would be for children, and with what we know already on the behavioral level from this study, would be really interesting. And so she was working on that and I think future directions would include continuing that study.
C: Oh, very cool. Yeah. And you could map their behavioral data with their neuroimaging data.
P: Exactly, yeah!
C: Very nice.
T: Okay, so I think that's it! That was a great interview, it was very fun talking to you, and very interesting to talk about this project in particular. I'm very interested in development, and so is Crystal I'm sure.
P: Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun, and it was great to talk with other scientifically minded people about this, it was really cool!
Isabel: This episode of the highlights was written by Thiago Tarraf Varella, and Crystal Lee. It was produced by Isabel Rodrigues under the 145th managing board of the 'Prince'. For more podcasts and other digital media from the 'Prince,' visit www.dailyprincetonian.com. Many thanks to Patricia Hoyos for speaking with us. To read more about Patricia's work, you can check out the Princeton Insights article covering her research, which can be found in the description of this episode. Thanks for listening, until next time!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai