Despite the discovery of body-selective neural areas in occipitotemporal cortex, little is known about how bodies are visually coded. We used perceptual adaptation to determine how body identity is coded. Brief exposure to a body (e.g., anti-Rose) biased perception toward an identity with opposite properties (Rose). Moreover, the size of this…

We investigated the effects of instruction method and cross-language similarity during second language (L2) grammar learning. English speakers learned a subset of Swedish using contrast and color highlighting (Salience Group), contrast and highlighting with grammatical explanations (Rule & Salience Group), or neither (Control Group with…

This article describes a research study on the connection of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) with Science Education in the early grades. The research study took place in the University of Ioannina, Greece with the support of the @fise research group. Within this frame, a narrative about light, colors and shadows was written as part of…

Sepia tones range from pale neutral cream, tan, and amber all the way to deep chocolate brown; some even have dark green undertones. Sepia tones are used primarily by photographers. Photographers opt to print their photos in sepia because of the warmer, almost old-fashioned look it has. Art is considered "anthropomorphic" when an object or an…

A salient stimulus may interrupt visual search because of attentional capture. It has been shown that attentional capture occurs with a wide, but not with a small attentional window. We tested the hypothesis that capture depends more strongly on the shape of the attentional window than on its size. Search elements were arranged in two nested…

This lesson teaches students that a drawing does not have to be realistic to be a valued piece of art. It's fun to have students look at abstracts and ask them what they think they see. As they excitedly yell out "It's a bird," "It's a flower," "Huh? I don't see that!" they begin to realize the beauty of an abstract. It can be so many things to so…

In this study we sought to determine the effect of daily sucrose consumption in young rats on their subsequent performance in tasks that involve the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. High levels of sugar consumption have been associated with the development of obesity, however less is known about how sugar consumption influences behavioral…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to propose an effective educational system to help students assess Web site risk by providing an environment in which students can better understand a Web site's features and determine the risks of accessing the Web site for themselves. Design/methodology/approach: The authors have enhanced a prototype…

Congruency effects were examined using a manual response version of the Stroop task in which the relationship between the colour word and its hue on incongruent trials was either kept constant or varied randomly across different pairings within the stimulus set. Congruency effects were increased in the condition where the incongruent hue-word…

As we turn more and more to high-end computing to understand the Universe at cosmological scales, dynamic visualizations of simulations will take on a vital role as perceptual and cognitive tools. In collaboration with the Adler Planetarium and University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC), I am interested in better…

It has been shown that the left and right cerebral hemispheres (LH and RH) respectively process qualitative or "categorical" spatial relations and metric or "coordinate" spatial relations. However, categorical spatial information could be thought as divided into two types: semantically-coded and visuospatially-coded categorical information. We…

This study intends to investigate how multi-symbolic representations (text, digits, and colors) could effectively enhance the completion of co-located/distant collaborative work in a virtual reality context. Participants' perceptions and behaviors were also studied. A haptics-enhanced virtual reality task was developed to conduct…

We present a proposal--"The Sampling Hypothesis"--suggesting that the variability in young children's responses may be part of a rational strategy for inductive inference. In particular, we argue that young learners may be randomly sampling from the set of possible hypotheses that explain the observed data, producing different hypotheses with…

Maljkovic and Nakayama have demonstrated memory influences in singleton search from one trial to the next, an effect they termed "priming of pop-out" (PoP). This effect was described as resulting from the persistence of an implicit memory trace, the influence of which could be observed for around 5-8 subsequent trials. Thomson and…

This laboratory was developed by undergraduate students in collaboration with the course instructor as part of a peer-developed and peer-led lab curriculum in a general chemistry course. The goal was to explore the hypothesis that crystal violet lactone was responsible for the thermochromic properties of a sipping straw using a FT-IR for…