Check out some of the cool summer research happening on campus! Students in Professor Michael Pitts’ lab have been assisting with neuroscience research designed to manipulate and understand visual consciousness. The team of Reedies—Lucy ’23, Avanthika ’24, Isabella ’25, and Angelica ’25—have been performing a series of three tests in which they present a research subject with pictures of houses and faces on a screen. In each test, the images are front and center, but the subject only consciously perceives them half of the time, either because the subject is distracted, because the colors are fused, or because the image is masked by another. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG), the team measures brain activity in research subjects across all three tests. By analyzing the EEG data, they’re hoping to pinpoint the minimum set of neuronal events that are required for the subject to consciously perceive an image. In other words, they’re looking for which neural activity patterns can be u...