Lab collective outreach activity at Festival de la Ciència (June 2018)

In this science dissemination activity several members of the lab made a stand in the Barcelona Science Festival 2018 which tood place in the Ciutadella Park. For a full weekend, we explain to a lay audience how neurons work, how working memory operates and what neuroprosthetics is about. More importantly we designed several games so that people could experience first hand what these concepts mean. First, we programmed a visual working (WM) task in which participants could engage and meassure the WM capaciti. The task was programmed as a video game with a ranking showing the top ten participants, something which generated an incentive in some people to keep playing and improve. The we prepared a very fun game called the Neural Code Game. In it, the audience had to learn what a population code was, leaning concepts such as rate tuning, and then look at patterns of activity and decipher what the presented stimulus had been. At the end we also played with the Claw from Backyard Brains, by making a little contest between pairs of participants in which they had to pick up ping-pong balls using the claw and put them inside a cup. It was a lot of effort to put everything together but because it was a collective commitment it played out well as a boding activity for the members of the lab engaded in it.