Virtual Outreach in pandemic times

Today, April 10th, several members of the Brain Circuits and Behavior lab participated in an outreach activity within the Joves per la Medicina initiative. And even though we had several restrictions due to the covid-19 pandemic, we managed to perform a great interactive virtual activity.

The event started with a general introduction by Jaime de la Rocha about Neuroscience as a discipline. Then, David Bestué, Daniel Duque and Lluís Hernández took over by explaining the concept of working memory. Additionally, we had a live connection with Eva Carrillo, who was training animals in the animal facility and gathering data to understand working memory processes. And since we didn’t want the virtual environment to prevent the kids from having an immersive activity, we created an online working memory task (taking advantage of available online resources) so that they could experience at first hand how experiments are performed in the lab. Afterwards, all kids analyzed and visualized their own responses simultaneously with an easy-to-follow template in google sheets. As this platform updates documents on the fly, they could experience the whole process on their own, which motivated the students to ask great questions during the discussion. These incisive questions evinced the high-levels of implication; showing that they ended up understanding much better the limits of our working memory capabilities!

Furthermore, with this activity we wanted to stress the pluridisciplinar nature of Neuroscience. That is, in order to understand the brain in all its facets, you not only need to know about Biology, but you also need to have some knowledge about Electronics, Mathematics, Psychology, Statistics…

David Sánchez Bestué, Daniel Duque and Lluís Hernández-Navarro.

Example working memory task frame: on each trial, students had to learn the positions of all the squares, remember them during a given delay period, and then correctly retrieve the position of a randomly-selected color square. Each student performed the working memory task from their personal computer, and then shared and discussed their results with the rest of the group, scaling from individual data to general collective trends.