Averting gaze from another person's face generally improves cognitive performance, yet, little is known about how witnesses' gaze direction affects their recall during investigative interviews. Here, participants witnessed a video-recorded incident, and were interviewed via free recall and closed questions following a short delay. In Experiment 1,…

Contribution: A didactic methodology, based on analytical expressions and experimental validation, to describe the process of abrupt current interruption in a series RL circuit, that considers real passive components and uses a toggle switch as disconnecting device. Background: In undergraduate courses, circuits adopted in transient analysis…

To facilitate learning advanced instrumental techniques, essential tools for visualizing biomaterials, a simple and versatile laboratory exercise demonstrating the use of Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) in biomedical applications was developed. In this experiment, the morphology of heat-denatured and amyloid-type aggregates formed from a low-cost…

Experiments on theories of reference have mostly tested referential intuitions. We think that experiments should rather be testing linguistic usage. Substantive Aim (I): to test classical description theories of proper names against usage by "elicited production." Our results count decisively against those theories. Methodological Aim…

For researchers seeking to improve education, a common goal is to identify teaching practices that have causal benefits in classroom settings. To test whether an instructional practice exerts a causal influence on an outcome measure, the most straightforward and compelling method is to conduct an experiment. While experimentation is common in…

This article reports an eye-movement experiment in which participants scanned continuous sequences of Landolt-Cs for target circles to examine the visual and oculomotor constraints that might jointly determine where the eyes move in a task that engages many of the perceptual and motor processes involved in Chinese reading but without lexical or…

Generally, people respond faster to small numbers with left-sided responses and large numbers with right-sided responses, a pattern known as the SNARC (spatial numerical association of response codes) effect. The SNARC effect is interpreted as evidence for amodal automatic access of magnitude and its spatial associations, because it occurs in…

Past research indicates that individuals respond adaptively to contextual factors in multiattribute choice tasks. Yet it remains unclear how this adaptation is cognitively governed. In this article, empirically testable implementations of two prominent competing theoretical frameworks are developed and compared across two multiattribute choice…

Learning naturalistic categories, which tend to have fuzzy boundaries and vary on many dimensions, can often be harder than learning well defined categories. One method for facilitating the category learning of naturalistic stimuli may be to provide explicit feature descriptions that highlight the characteristic features of each category. Although…

Currently, the physics disciplines are represented by a significantly larger number of professional males, compared to females. Although the problem of underrepresentation of female physicists has several causes, one likely reason is the lower interest that female school students have in physics activities. Several instructional solutions have…

To understand the excitation-contraction (E-C) coupling of cardiomyocytes, including the electrophysiological mechanism of their characteristically long action potential duration, is one of the major learning goals in medical physiology. However, the integrative interpretation of the responses occurring during the contraction-relaxation cycle is…

New technologies are being developed every day. Many of these may not make it into the curriculum for technology and engineering students. For those that do, there may be quite a delay between the time the technology is introduced at an industrial scale and when the technology is developed at a relatively low cost and small scale needed to…

Participants gave recognition judgments for short lists of pictures of everyday objects. Pictures in a given list were an equal mixture of three types that varied according to the way they were used as targets and foils earlier in the same session. Under consistent-mapping (CM), targets and foils never switch roles; under varied-mapping (VM),…

When the road is wet (there is a water layer on the road surface), the road marks become blurred and drivers are distracted. We discuss the contributing processes and identify which processes are dominant to the occurrence of this phenomenon. Modelling and a simple experiment demonstrate that the dominant processes are: (a) refraction of light by…

Capsaicin has been shown to modulate synaptic plasticity in various brain regions including the amygdala. Whereas in the lateral amygdala the modulatory effect of capsaicin on long-term potentiation (LA-LTP) is mediated by TRPV1 channels, we have recently shown that capsaicin-induced enhancement of long term depression (LA-LTD) is mediated by…