The authors describe a case of aseptic meningitis in a college student that was ultimately attributed to infection with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV). The authors also provide a review of LCMV infection, epidemiology, and public health implications. Providers should be aware of LCMV as a cause of meningitis in college students,…

Aim: Essential fatty acids (EFAs), also known as omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, have been claimed to have beneficial effects as a treatment for attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Animal experiments have provided information about the role of EFA in the brain, and several mechanisms of EFA activity are well known. The current review…

Animals have always been close to the heart of humankind. They appear in the earliest imagery as the very first subjects of art. Household pets are a fixture for many a family. This is true in art as well. In shifting the balance away from animals as pure symbols, the Impressionists identified them as members of the household. One of the most…

In this article, the author describes a lesson he created for his second-grade classes which was inspired by the children's book, "Why is Blue Dog Blue?", by George Rodrigue. In this lesson, the students make associations between places, food and events to determine the color of their dogs. (Contains 3 resources.)

Many languages distinguish generic utterances (e.g., "Tigers are ferocious") from non-generic utterances (e.g., "Those tigers are ferocious"). Two studies examined how generic language specially links properties and categories. We used a novel-word extension task to ask if 4- to 5-year-old children and adults distinguish…

The medicinal leech is a useful animal model for investigating undulatory swimming in the classroom. Unlike many swimming organisms, its swimming performance can be quantified without specialized equipment. A large blood meal alters swimming behavior in a way that can be used to generate a discussion of the hydrodynamics of swimming, muscle…

Previous research indicates that the ontological status that adults attribute to categories varies systematically by domain. For example, adults view distinctions between different animal species as natural and objective, but view distinctions between different kinds of furniture as more conventionalized and subjective. The present work (N=435;…

This study examined the impact of attachment on grief severity following the death of a pet. Seventy-one participants who had lost a dog or cat within the past year completed a set of measures that included an attachment measure assessing individual differences in attachment anxiety and avoidance, strength of the past attachment to the pet, the…

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulty with attention, impulsiveness, and safety issues; consequently, special measures must be taken to secure their safety. One such measure is canine intervention, which provides children with highly trained service dogs that can respond to their autism behaviors. Social support theory…

Although attention to the effects of child-animal interactions on children's development has increased in the last three decades, developmental psychology has not attended to the importance of the effects of animals on children's development. There is a need to consider the possible impacts of animals as significant social partners for children's…

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) plays a role in hedonic reactivity to taste stimuli. Learning can alter the hedonic valence of a given stimulus, and it remains unclear how the NAc encodes this shift. The present study examined whether the population response of NAc neurons to a taste stimulus is plastic using a conditioned taste aversion (CTA)…

If a picture is worth a thousand words, think about how long it takes your students to read a thousand words. Case studies are effective and stimulating ways to teach a variety of subjects, including the biological sciences. In learning the details of a particular case, students develop skills in both deductive and inductive reasoning, hypothesis…

Children take years to learn symbolic arithmetic. Nevertheless, non-human animals, human adults with no formal education, and human infants represent approximate number in arrays of objects and sequences of events, and they use these capacities to perform approximate addition and subtraction. Do children harness these abilities when they begin to…

Four rats' choices between two levers were differentially reinforced using a runs-test algorithm. On each trial, a runs-test score was calculated based on the last 20 choices. In Experiment 1, the onset of stimulus lights cued when the runs score was smaller than criterion. Following cuing, the correct choice was occasionally reinforced with food,…

Considerable research has examined the contrasting predictions of configural and elemental associative accounts of learning. One of the simplest methods to distinguish between these approaches is the summation test, in which the associative strength of a novel compound (AB) made of two separately-trained cues (A+ and B+) is examined. The…