Present at Neuromatch Conference 3.0

Today, I talked about my research on studying travel direction using a motion adaptation paradigm at Neuromatch Conference 3.0 (nmc3). I am glad to share my research with the general neuroscience community and I appreciate the good suggestions from other neuroscientists on the next step of my research.

This time, the talk format is composed of 12 min presentation + 3 min Q&A. As I have already managed to present the whole study within 5 min earlier this month at iNAV (see the other post), finishing the talk within 12 min became a piece of cake, so my focus became incorporating new contents to improve the quality of the talk. This time, to make the the whole experimental process appeared clearer to the audience, I replaced the previous experimental flow figure with video demos. Another highlight is that, I started my talk with a real-life example – with someone came across a bunny on the way walking to a Starbucks. And the feedback I received is that the bunny example immediately made my research question very clear and convincing to the audience. I am happy that I made the attempt to use the example as my opening. This is a type of the S.P.I.N. opening strategy I learned from the Science Communication Bootcamp led by Sandra Tsing Loh in the past month. S.P.I.N is acronym for “scene, person to person, imagination, news”, which are the four recommended ways to attract audience at the very beginning of a talk. One thing to add on to that is, science communication is traditionally aimed for general public (i.e., non-scientists), which is why I called using the example an “attempt” earlier because I doubt if it would sound too naïve to other scientists. I finally decided to use the example in this talk because my audiences are scientists from general neuroscience community, who are not necessarily spatial neuroscientists. With that in mind, what works for the general public might still work for the general neuroscientists, and it did! Let me just end the post with Sandra’s words, “Don’t start a talk with a cheddar cheese, start with a Lasagna!”