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…

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…

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…

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…

Observers given brief exposures of pairs of colored bars and asked to report both the color and the orientation of each bar showed evidence of stochastic independence between reports of the 4 features (2 colors and 2 orientations). The authors also found virtually perfect stochastic independence between reports of colors and directions of motion…

The seventh- and eight-grade students in the author's art program sharpened up their eyesight and their use of color charts in preparation for an op art project. Op art is short for "optical patterns and designs." The goal of the project is to create and organize line and color into shapes, patterns, and design in symmetrical and asymmetrical…

Proponents of a self-identified "relativist" view of cross-language color naming have confounded two questions: (1) Is color naming largely subject to local linguistic convention? and (2) Are cross-language color naming differences reflected in comparable differences in color cognition by their speakers? The "relativist"…

Del Giacco Art Therapy is a cognitive art therapy process that focuses on stimulating the mental sensory systems and working to stabilize the nervous system and create new neural connections in the brain. This system was created by Maureen Del Giacco, Phd. after recovering from her own traumatic brain injury and is based on extensive research of…

Meaningful visual experience requires computations that identify objects as the same persisting individuals over time, motion, occlusion, and featural change. This article explores these computations in the tunnel effect: When an object moves behind an occluder, and then an object later emerges following a consistent trajectory, observers…