Recent research has shown that adults can implicitly learn artificial phonotactics constraints from experience producing syllables that contain those constraints, and that this learning is reflected in their speech errors. However, second-order constraints in which the placement of a consonant depends on another characteristic of the syllable…

The purpose of this paper is to study identification and estimation of causal effects in experiments with multiple sources of noncompliance. This research design arises in many applications in education when access to oversubscribed programs is partially determined by randomization. Eligible households decide whether or not to comply with the…

The pioneering work by Kirk-Smith, Van Toller, and Dodd [Kirk-Smith, M. D., Van Toller, C., & Dodd, G. H. (1983). "Unconscious odour conditioning in human subjects." "Biological Psychology," 17, 221-231], established that an unnoticed odorant paired with an emotionally meaningful task can influence mood and attitudes when the odorant alone is…

We present a procedure for measuring slit width and separation in single- and double-slit diffraction experiments. Intensity spectra of diffracted laser light are measured with an optical sensor (PIN diode). Slit widths and separations are extracted by fitting to the measured spectra. We present a simple fitting procedure to account for the…

Based on our novel method recently published in the "Am. J. Phys." 77 337-43 (2009) for finding precise values of the indices of refraction for dielectrics from measurements of the polarized light reflected by the surface, in this paper we propose an improved technique for finding Brewster angles with a better precision, of 0.001 degrees, using…

Extracting DNA from fruit and vegetables provides students with hands-on opportunities to engage with a visualisation of genetic material that can later be supported by ICT and practical model making. Here is a quick, cheap and easy way to extract DNA from strawberries that avoids the mess involved in other DNA extractions, such as from dried…

We describe a simple, low-cost laboratory session to demonstrate the Fahraeus-Lindqvist effect, a microphase flow phenomenon that occurs in small blood vessels and alters the effective rheological properties of blood. The experiments are performed by flowing cells through microchannels fabricated by soft lithography and characterization of cell…

The remote associates test (RAT) is a complex verbal task with associations to both creative thought and general intelligence. RAT problems require not only lateral associations and the internal production of many words but a convergent focus on a single answer. Complex problem-solving of this sort may thus require both substantial verbal…

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to a delay in response time (RT) to targets appearing at a previously cued location. The prevailing view is that IOR reflects visual-motor inhibition. The "attentional momentum" account rejects this idea, and instead proposes that IOR reflects an automatic shift of attention away from the cued location…

A set-up comprising a magnetic disc, a solenoid and a mechanical balance was used to teach first-year physics students Newton's third law with the help of a free body diagram. The image of a floating magnet immobilized by the solenoid's repulsive force should help dispel a common misconception of students as regards the first law: that stationary…

Purpose: This study examined the effect of fundamental frequency (F0) variation on the intelligibility of speech in an alaryngeal talker who used an electrolarynx (EL). Method: One experienced alaryngeal talker produced variable F0 and a constant F0 with his EL as he read sentences aloud. As a control, a group of sentences with variable F0 was…

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to identify regions involved in working memory (WM) retrieval. Neural activation was examined in two WM tasks: an item recognition task, which can be mediated by a direct-access retrieval process, and a judgment of recency task that requires a serial search. Dissociations were found in the activation…

We tested 7-month-old infants' sensitivity to others' goals in an imitation task, and assessed whether infants are as likely to imitate the goals of nonhuman agents as they are to imitate human goals. In the current studies, we used the paradigm developed by Hamlin et. al (in press) to test infants' responses to human actions versus closely…

Simultaneous and temporal masking are two frequently used techniques in psychology and vision science. Although there are many studies and theories related to each masking technique, there are no systematic investigations of their mutual relationship, even though both techniques are often applied together. Here, the authors show that temporal…

Predictions from perceptual load theory (Lavie, 1995, 2005) regarding object recognition across the same or different viewpoints were tested. Results showed that high perceptual load reduces distracter recognition levels despite always presenting distracter objects from the same view. They also showed that the levels of distracter recognition were…