Sonia Muscatine '08 Spends Field Work Term at the Stanford Psychology Lab

Each year they attend the College, Bennington students must go out into the world to complete seven-week winter internships in areas that fascinate them and complement their studies. Field Work Term, going strong since the College's founding, brings new stories each year. Here's one such tale from FWT 2006.

Sonia Muscatine '08: Stanford University Psychology Lab, Palo Alto, CA

Sonia Muscatine warps brain scans.

Don't be alarmed. It isn't some kind of neurology lab vandalism. It was, however, a key part of Muscatine's Field Work Term internship at the Stanford University Psychology Lab in Palo Alto, CA.

Muscatine--a Bennington sophomore who studies psychology and social science--worked as a student research assistant at the mood and anxiety disorders lab, and found herself plunging into aspects of psychology she'd never encountered before. "Some of my favorite parts of the job were on the data side of things. One of the things the lab does is functional MRIs: brain scans while a person is doing certain tasks, so you can see the corresponding parts of their brain light up. I got to look at a lot of the scan data and prepare it for analysis, including nudging and warping.

"What happens is this: The person has to hold really still while their brain is being scanned, or else the picture jumps all over. But even after 20 minutes of being in the machine, their head sinks into the pillow, which changes the picture. The way we adjusted for this problem was to take an anatomical picture of the brain at the beginning, and then, when we got the data back, nudge and warp it back with a special computer program. It allows you to line up certain markers in the brain, but you need to know what you're looking for--find the thickest and thinnest part of a certain brain section--and then get them to line up at under two degrees of separation. I've never done anything even remotely like that before."

Muscatine worked on several different studies, learning not only about data analysis but also about the planning that goes into research. "In one study, we looked at how different people process information, specifically people who are depressed, bipolar, or social phobic. Using computer tasks and questionnaires, we asked them to do things like identifying if a face was happy or sad or neutral. But think about it: if you're social phobic, even a neutral face isn't neutral, so we had to use just a plain oval. I learned so much about the different things you have to account for."

"They invited me back for the summer, expanding my work to include phone screening, more FMRI scan sessions, learning to actually operate the machine and do the computer setup." And continuing to complement her Bennington education with time at another institution across the country is one of the things Muscatine says she most values about Field Work Term. "I took a lot of advantage of being on that campus, and it was interesting to think of my Bennington education in terms of my Stanford experience."

Ask Bennington alumni to recount their most remarkable stories from their college years, and you're likely to hear tales like these from across the country and across the globe--set in political campaigns and research laboratories, law offices and art museums, hospitals and theaters, newspapers and national parks. Stay tuned for another one next week, and be sure to check out last week's story on Alex Katz '09 at the Jim Henson Company and the previous week's story on Owen Lubozynski '07 at the Buffalo Field Campaign.

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