An experiment, in which students were given the opportunity to perform molecular dynamics simulations on a series of molecular liquids using the Amber suite of programs, is presented. They were introduced to both physical theories underlying classical mechanics simulations and to the atom-atom pair distribution function.

An instructive experiment for the synthesis of ethyl trans-cinnamate, a pleasant smelling ester used in perfumery and flavoring by the reaction of benzaldehyde with the stable ylid triphenylphosphorane is described. The synthesis, workup and characterization of trans-cinnamate may be accomplished in a single laboratory session with commonly…

For small colleges, the use of invertebrates in undergraduate learning laboratory experiments may be a valuable alternative to the use of vertebrate species. This article describes a habituation experiment using terrestrial hermit crabs. All of the materials required are inexpensive and readily available. What makes this experiment unique is that…

The present review of object individuation in infancy is divided into five sections. The first section is a brief history of the field and an outline of the development of efficient methods for studying object individuation among infants. Sections 2 and 3 are structured around the empirical evidence obtained by using two different kinds of basic…

Four experiments are reported in which people organize a space hierarchically when they estimate particular locations in that space. Earlier work showed that people subdivide circles into quadrants bounded at the vertical and horizontal axes, biasing their estimates towards prototypical diagonal locations within those spatial categories…

Two experiments investigate whether relations that link the constituents of compounds during compound formation (e.g., "teapot" is formed by combining "tea" and "pot" using the relation "head noun FOR modifier") also influence the processing of familiar compounds. Although there is evidence for the use of such relations in forming compounds,…

In four experiments using albino rats in an ABA fear renewal paradigm, we studied conditioned fear in the A test context following extinction in Context B. Conditioned suppression of operant responding was the index of fear. In Experiments 1-3, we found that extinguishing a feared cue in compound with a putative conditioned inhibitor of fear led…

Modern logic provides accounts of both interpretation and derivation which work together to provide abstract frameworks for modelling the sensitivity of human reasoning to task, context and content. Cognitive theories have underplayed the importance of interpretative processes. We illustrate, using Wason's [Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 20 (1968) 273]…

This article reviews experiments completed over the past decade at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and the State University of New York at Geneseo concerning speech produced during simultaneous communication (SC) and synthesizes the empirical evidence concerning the acoustical and perceptual characteristics of speech in SC.…

This paper examined the effects of personality traits on individuals' reactions to broken promises. We studied the effects of Neuroticism and Agreeableness on emotive and cognitive responses to breach and investigated whether these effects varied across different types (economic vs. social) and severity (high vs. low) of breach. We collected data…

Real-world situations involve attending to spatially extended objects, often under conditions of motion and high processing load. The present experiments investigated such processing by requiring observers to attentionally track a number of long, moving lines. Concurrently, observers responded to sporadic probes as a measure of the distribution of…

In the voluntary task switching procedure, subjects choose the task to perform on a series of bivalent stimuli, requiring top-down control of task switching. Experiments 1-3 contrasted voluntary task switching and explicit task cuing. Choice behavior showed small, inconsistent effects of external stimulus characteristics, supporting the assumption…

The authors conducted 3 experiments investigating the effect of context variability and word frequency on free recall. Context variability refers to the number of preexperimental contexts in which a given word is experienced. Both between-subjects and within-subjects manipulations of context variability demonstrated a distinct advantage for low…

Prominent views of implicit priming agree that repetition of category exemplars should increase the probability of the exemplar coming to mind on a category production test. This prediction has been borne out in the data of numerous experiments that have used relatively high-frequency exemplars, but experiments that have used lower frequency…

We have recently argued that unconscious numerical stimuli might activate responses by a match with prespecified action trigger codes (action trigger account) rather than by semantic prime processing (elaborate processing account). [Van Opstal, F., Reynvoet, B., and Verguts, T. (2005). How to trigger elaborate processing? A comment on Kunde,…