Describes two new exercises in classical conditioning that use earthworms and houseflies. The animals are available year-round and pose no risk to the students or instructor. The conditioned stimuli are odorants. These elicit a conditioned response of contraction in worms or proboscis extension in flies. (MJP)

Investigates the effects of two instructional strategies, visual display (animation, and static graphics with and without motion cues) and contextual presentation, in the acquisition of electronic troubleshooting skills using computer-based instruction. Study concludes that use of visual displays and contextual presentation be based on the…

A multiple baseline design across three parent-child dyads of families with multiple risk factors was used to determine the effectiveness of teaching parents to use milieu language teaching procedures. Parents were taught to use two sets of milieu language teaching skills: responsive interaction and incidental teaching. Results showed that parents…

Today's "out-of-school learning" is dominated by PC games, videos, and TV. These media provide children with optimal conditions for nurturing their visuospatial intelligence. In "chemistry" and biochemistry, over the past 125 years, thinking has shifted from the "logical-mathematical" to the "logical-visuospatial." In chemistry visuospatial…

Of all the sciences, biology has probably made the most rapid progress in recent years and the need for this to be reflected in a new Advanced Level biology course has long been recognised in the UK. After wide-ranging consultation and successful piloting in over 50 schools and colleges in England and Wales, the new Salters-Nuffield Advanced…

Background: Unusual responses to sensory stimuli are seen in many children with autism. Their presence was highlighted both in early accounts of autism and in more recent first-person descriptions. There is a widespread belief that sensory symptoms characterize autism and differentiate it from other disorders. This paper examines the empirical…

Background: Debates about the developmental origins of adult face processing could be directly addressed if a clear infant neural marker could be identified. Previous research with infants remains open to criticism regarding the control stimuli employed. Methods: We recorded ERPs from adults and 3-month-old infants while they watched faces and…

Intergroup attitudes were assessed in African-American (N=70) and non-African-American minority (N=80) children, evenly divided by gender, in first (M=6.5 years old) and fourth (M=9.6 years old) grades attending mixed-ethnicity public schools in a suburban area of a large mid-Atlantic city in the USA. Children were interviewed to test hypotheses…

Children (ages 5, 7, and 9 years) and young adults completed two visual attention tasks that required them to make a forced choice identification response to a target shape presented in the center of a computer screen. In the first task (high correlation condition) each target was flanked with the same distracters on 80% of the trials (valid…

Research on children with normal hearing shows that the word-processed narratives they produce are better than their hand-written narratives. Hearing children come to school with prior experience in narrating stories, and in school they learn to transfer this to written narrative form. However, children who are deaf and hard of hearing have less…

We investigated how size and depth are perceived in a plane or convex mirror. In Experiment 1, using a plane or convex mirror, 20 observers viewed a separation between two objects that were presented at a constant distance and reproduced it by a separation between other two objects in a natural viewing situation. The mean matches generally…

Native language affects the perception of segmental phonetic structure, of stress, and of semantic and pragmatic effects of intonation. Similarly, native language might influence the perception of similarities and differences among intonation contours. To test this hypothesis, a cross-language experiment was conducted. An English utterance was…

Grammatical priming of picture naming was investigated in Kiswahili, which has a complex grammatical noun class system (a system like grammatical gender), with up to 15 noun classes that have obligatory agreements on adjectives, verbs, pronouns and other parts of speech. Participants heard a grammatically agreeing (concordant), nonagreeing…

Two experiments examined the effects of reductions in cortical cholinergic function on performance of a novel task that allowed for the simultaneous assessment of attention to a visual stimulus and memory for that stimulus over a variable delay within the same test session. In the first experiment, infusions of the muscarinic receptor antagonist…

Using a conditioned suppression task, we investigated extinction and renewal of Pavlovian modulation in human sequential Feature Positive (FP) discrimination learning. In Experiment 1, in context a participants were first trained on two FP discriminations, X[right arrow]A+/A- and Y[right arrow]B+/B-. Extinction treatment was administered in the…