Basic research with pigeons on behavioral momentum suggests that differential reinforcement of alternative behavior (DRA) can increase the resistance of target behavior to change. This finding suggests that clinical applications of DRA may inadvertently increase the persistence of target behavior even as it decreases its frequency. We conducted…

Using a sociocultural framework to approach intergenerational learning, this inquiry examines learning processes used by families during visits to one nature center. Data were collected from videotaped observations of families participating in an environmental education program and a follow-up task to draw the habitat of raptors. Based on a…

This article reports on the findings of a recent qualitative grounded theory research study in a metropolitan area in the south-east of Canada examining one junior/senior kindergarten classroom's engagement with nature. It focuses on the role of the learners, the children and the teacher, in co-constructing two very different learning experiences.…

Three experiments examined testing effects on learning of natural concepts and metacognitive assessments of such learning. Results revealed that testing enhanced recognition memory and classification accuracy for studied and novel exemplars of bird families on immediate and delayed tests. These effects depended on the balance of study and test…

In this article, the author focuses on the foundations of Anishinaabe treaty-making with the United States and Canada. The author first describes a story of "The Woman Who Married a Beaver," which illustrates Anishinaabe principles of respect, responsibility, and renewal that are critical in treaty making. "The Woman Who Married a…

When teaching the effect of temperature on biochemical reactions, the problem is usually oversimplified by confining the thermal effect to the catalytic constant, which is identified with the rate constant of the elementary limiting step. Therefore, only positive values for activation energies and values greater than 1 for temperature coefficients…

We do not know how vocal learning came to be, but it is such a salient trait in human evolution that many have tried to imagine it. In primates this is difficult because we are the only species known to possess this skill. Songbirds provide a richer and independent set of data. I use comparative data and ask broad questions: How does vocal…

A new online tool called "Science Pipes" allows students to conduct biodiversity investigations. With this free tool, students create and run analyses that would otherwise require access to unwieldy data sets and the ability to write computer code. Using these data, students can conduct guided inquiries or hypothesis-driven research to…

Newborn chicks were tested for their sensitivity to number vs. continuous physical extent of artificial objects they had been reared with soon after hatching. Because of the imprinting process, such objects were treated by chicks as social companions. We found that when the objects were similar, chicks faced with choices between 1 vs. 2 or 2 vs. 3…

Recent work showed that short-term memory (STM) is selectively reduced in GluR1 knockout mice. This raises the possibility that a form of synaptic modification dependent on GluR1 might underlie STM. Studies of synaptic plasticity have shown that stimuli too weak to induce long-term potentiation induce short-term potentiation (STP), a phenomenon…

When enumerating small sets of elements nonverbally, human infants often show a set-size limitation whereby they are unable to represent sets larger than three elements. This finding has been interpreted as evidence that infants spontaneously represent small numbers with an object-file system instead of an analog magnitude system (Feigenson,…

"Transitive inference" refers to the ability to judge from memory the relationships between indirectly related items that compose a hierarchically organized series, and this capacity is considered a fundamental feature of relational memory. Here we explored the role of the prefrontal cortex in transitive inference by examining the performance of…

B6-Tg/Thy1APP23Sdz (APP23) mutant mice exhibit neurohistological hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease but show intact basal hippocampal neurotransmission and synaptic plasticity. Here, we examine whether spatial learning differently modifies the structural and electrophysiological properties of hippocampal synapses in APP23 and wild-type mice. While…

Charles Sherrington identified the properties of the synapse by purely behavioral means--the study of reflexes--more than 100 years ago. They were subsequently confirmed neurophysiologically. Studying reflex interaction, he also showed that activating one reflex often facilitates another, antagonistic one: "successive induction," which has since…

In this article, the author describes a texture and pattern project. Students started by doing an outline contour drawing of an animal. With the outline drawn, the students then write one of their names to fit "inside" the animal.