This study examines students' reactions to the virtual biosciences laboratory developed in Second Life[R] (SL) at the University of East London. Final year undergraduates and masters students studying biotechnology took part in a trial of a virtual Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) experiment in Second Life and evaluated their experience by…

Robert Hooke's "Micrographia" (1665) holds an important place in the history of scientific visual rhetoric. Hooke's accomplishment lies not only in a stunning array of engravings, but also in a "pedagogy of sight"--a rhetorical framework that instructs readers how to view images in accordance with an ideological or epistemic program. Hooke not…

Water is the ideal green solvent for organic reactions. However, most organic molecules are insoluble in it. Herein, we report a laboratory module that takes advantage of this property. The Passerini reaction, a three-component coupling involving an isocyanide, aldehyde, and carboxylic acid, typically requires [similar to] 24 h reaction times in…

The perceptual loop theory of self-monitoring posits that auditory speech output is parsed by the comprehension system. For sign language, however, visual input from one's own signing is distinct from visual input received from another's signing. Two experiments investigated the role of visual feedback in the production of American Sign Language…

The flight trajectory of a water rocket can be reasonably calculated if the magnitude of the drag coefficient is known. The experimental determination of this coefficient with enough precision is usually quite difficult, but in this paper we propose a simple free-fall experiment for undergraduate students to reasonably estimate the drag…

Two word-by-word, self-paced reading experiments investigated the speed with which readers were sensitive to discourse-level anomalies. An account arguing for delayed sensitivity (Guzman & Klin, 2000) was contrasted with one allowing for rapid sensitivity (Myers & O'Brien, 1998). Anomalies related to spatial information (Experiment 1) and…

The environment contains considerable information that is distributed across space and time, and the visual system is remarkably sensitive to such information via the operation of visual statistical learning (VSL). Previous VSL studies have focused on establishing what kinds of statistical relationships can be learned but have not fully explored…

The direction of another person's gaze is difficult to ignore when presented at the center of attention. In 6 experiments, perception of unattended gaze was investigated. Participants made directional (left-right) judgments to gazing-face or pointing-hand targets, which were accompanied by a distractor face or hand. Processing of the distractor…

Observers can recognize other people from their movements. What is interesting is that observers are best able to recognize their own movements. Enhanced visual sensitivity to self-generated movement may reflect the contribution of motor planning processes to the visual analysis of human action. An alternative view is that enhanced visual…

Causal considerations must be relevant for those making decisions. Whether to bring an umbrella or leave it at home depends on the causal consequences of these options. However, most current decision theories do not address causal reasoning. Here, the authors propose a causal model theory of choice based on causal Bayes nets. The critical ideas…

Repetition priming refers to the facilitation of stimulus processing due to prior processing of the same or similar stimulus, and is one of the most primitive ways in which experience and practice can affect performance. Previous studies have produced contradictory results regarding the stability of repetition priming across development. Drawing…

In this experiment, physical science students measured the mass of several soda cans, measured the mass and volume of water displaced when these cans were placed in water, and determined whether these cans sank or floated in water. Then, the students plotted graphs of the mass of displaced water versus the volume of displaced water, the mass of…

The null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment and the constancy of the one-way speed of light in the "rest system" are used to formulate a simple problem, to be solved by elementary geometry techniques using a pair of compasses and non-graduated rulers. The solution consists of a drawing allowing a direct visualization of all the fundamental…

Participants in 2 experiments performed 2 simultaneous tasks: one, a dual-target detection task within a rapid sequence of target and distractor letters; the other, a cued reaction time task requiring participants to make a cued left-right response immediately after each letter sequence. Under these rapid visual presentation conditions, it is…

Backward inhibition (BI) refers to a reaction time cost incurred when returning to a recently abandoned task compared to returning to a task not recently performed. The effect has been proposed to reflect an inhibitory mechanism that aids transition from one task to another. The question arises as to precisely what aspects of a task may be…