In this paper, an experimental setup composed of a color-mixing device, power supply, and spectrometer is developed. This setup is available for students to do hands-on color mixing with red, green, and blue light in undergraduate labs. LED volt-ampere and spectrum characteristics are investigated. The apparatus was used to perform additive color…

The last few years have seen a rapid growth of interest amongst researchers in the crossmodal correspondences. One of the correspondences that has long intrigued artists is the putative association between colours and odours. While traditionally conceptualised in terms of synaesthesia, over the last quarter century or so, at least 20 published…

How does a picture teach a viewer to look at it, understand it, and make meaning? (The theoretical basis of this article and elements of its expression have been drawn from Peter Pericles Trifonas. (1998). "Cross-mediality and narrative textual form: A semiotic snalysis of the lexical and visual signs and codes of the picture bnook."…

An important aspect of science education involves helping students learn to read and communicate scientific information and arguments. In this note, I would like to share a resource that I have come across which I have found to be a useful tool for helping students improve those skills, learn content material, and acquaint them with a great…

This column provides background science information for elementary teachers. This month's issue helps teachers to understand color mixing so that they can teach this information to students.

Fifth graders responded to a video of a picturebook,"The Red Tree" by Shaun Tan. They had not experienced explicit instruction in visual literacy and their responses served as a foundation for basic understanding of their analysis. We learned that they focused on four major areas: emotional aspects; visual qualities, summaries of the…

The standard method to create dramatic color images in astrophotography is to record multiple black and white images, each with a different color filter in the optical path, and then tint each frame with a color appropriate to the corresponding filter. When combined, the resulting image conveys information about the sources of emission in the…

To avoid sensory overload, people are able to selectively attend to a particular color or direction of motion while ignoring irrelevant stimuli that differ from the desired one. We show here for the first time that it is also possible to selectively attend to a specific line orientation--but with an important caveat: orientations that are…

A sophisticated form of nonelemental learning is provided by occasion setting. In this paradigm, animals learn to disambiguate an uncertain conditioned stimulus using alternative stimuli that do not enter into direct association with the unconditioned stimulus. For instance, animals may learn to discriminate odor rewarded from odor nonrewarded…

Generating, collecting, and analyzing data is an essential practice in the science classroom (NRC 2012). Taking this data and using it to craft an explanation that demonstrates understanding of content is another essential practice. But both practices can be challenging, and students often require teacher support to succeed. Accordingly, the…

We have developed an undergraduate laboratory activity to introduce students to microfluidics. In the activity, each student constructs their own microfluidic device using simple photolithographic techniques and then uses the device to separate a food dye mixture by electrophoresis. Dyes are used so that students are able to visually observe the…

Information design has practical and theoretical components. As an academic discipline we may view information design as a combined discipline, a practical theory, or as a theoretical practice. So far information design has incorporated facts, influences, methods, practices, principles, processes, strategies, and tools from a large number of…

We comment on Goldstein, Davidoff, and Roberson's replication and extension ("Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102", 219-238 [2009]) of our study of the effect of toddlers' color term knowledge on their categorical perception (CP) of color ("Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 90", 114-141 [2005]). First, we discuss how best to…

Light is radiation in wavelengths composed of many colors that are visible to the eyes. These wavelengths can be separated. One way to separate colors is with a filter. Filters keep certain wavelengths out and allow other wavelengths to pass through. In this article, the authors discuss an activity to provide students the opportunity to build a…

Functional neuroimaging research has demonstrated that retrieving information about object-associated colors activates the left fusiform gyrus in posterior temporal cortex. Although regions near the fusiform have previously been implicated in color perception, it remains unclear whether color knowledge retrieval actually activates the color…