Alex Naylor ’24 — My Name’s Alex Naylor and this summer I was given the amazing opportunity to work under Professor Gunther to aid in her research in color vision with my Colleague Isaac Temores. In our internship the main goal was to test subjects in a variety of different conditions varying in the stimulus and the background noise. Our tests looked to see if gratings (processed in the cortex) better reveal the non-cardinal mechanisms that Professor Gunther hypotheses are in the cortex. My internship consisted of three main facets. The first being taking the tests themselves and collecting my personal data. The second, running tests on both Isaac and other summer interns and the third conducting research to better understand the visual system as a whole specifically in color perception.
Throughout the internship we reviewed articles concerning our topics broadening our understanding as well as discussing ethics with the other Psych interns. Each day was a new learning experience giving me many new skills I will be able to use in further studies. Toward the end of the research Isaac and I began prep work for the Optical Society of America conference in Seattle this Fall by creating our poster and writing the abstract that will be used on the conference’s website.
I would first like to thank Wabash for the opportunity to stay on campus and use their facilities for my internship. Especially as a Freshman I would have not had an opportunity like this at a bigger university. I would also like to thank the National Science Foundation for the grant that funded my internship as well as Isaac for being a great colleague to work with and learn from. I would especially like to thank Professor Gunther for giving me the opportunity to be her intern not only mentoring me in the field of color vision but also Psych and the college experience as a whole.
