Despite the popularity of skateboarding worldwide, the authors believe that no previous studies have investigated the metabolic demands associated with recreational participation in the sport. Although metabolic equivalents (METs) for skateboarding were published in textbooks, the source of these values is unclear. Therefore, the rise in…

One of the main tenets of the mental model theory is that when individuals reason, they think about possibilities. According to this theory, reasoning on what is possible from the truth of a sentence would be psychologically basic, whereas reasoning the other way round, on the truth or falsity of a sentence from a given state of affairs, would…

Three experiments investigated the effects of test-induced priming (TIP) on false recognition in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott procedure (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). In Experiment 1, TIP significantly increased false recognition for participants who made old/new decisions at test but not for participants who made remember/know…

Taking a test has been shown to produce enhanced retention of the retrieved information. On tests, however, students often encounter questions the answers for which they are unsure. Should they guess anyway, even if they are likely to answer incorrectly? Or are errors engrained, impairing subsequent learning of the correct answer? We sought to…

Imitative compatibility, or automatic imitation, has been used as a measure of imitative performance and as a behavioral index of the functioning of the human mirror system (e.g., Brass, Bekkering, Wohlschlager, & Prinz, 2000; Heyes, Bird, Johnson, & Haggard, 2005; Kilner, Paulignan, & Blakemore, 2003). However, the use of imitative…

Upon learning the outcome to a problem, people tend to believe that they knew it all along ("hindsight bias"). Here, we report the first study to trace the development of hindsight bias across the life span. One hundred ninety-four participants aged 3 to 95 years completed 3 tasks designed to measure visual and verbal hindsight bias. All age…

Tris(1,10-phenanthroline)iron(II) is the basis of a suite of four experiments spanning 5 weeks. Students determine the rate law, activation energy, and equilibrium constant for the dissociation of the complex ion in acid solution and base dissociation constant for phenanthroline. The focus on one chemical system simplifies a daunting set of…

This experiment is designed to teach entry-level, nonchemistry-major students some basic organic chemistry through the procedure for making cosmetics. The experiment combines facial toner preparation with distillation techniques to create a stimulating learning environment. During the experiment, students perform a distillation to collect some…

Contemporary behavior analytic research is making headway in analyzing analogy as the establishment of a relation of coordination among common types of trained or derived relations. Previous studies have been focused on within-domain analogy. The current study expands previous research by analyzing cross-domain analogy as relating relations among…

Children are ubiquitous imitators, but how do they decide which actions to imitate? One possibility is that children rationally combine multiple sources of information about which actions are necessary to cause a particular outcome. For instance, children might learn from contingencies between action sequences and outcomes across repeated…

Probabilistic models of expected information gain require integrating prior knowledge about causal hypotheses with knowledge about possible actions that might generate data relevant to those hypotheses. Here we looked at whether preschoolers (mean: 54 months) recognize "action possibilities" (affordances) in the environment that allow them to…

Using two cardboard boxes, a light bulb socket, light bulbs of varying wattage, a thermometer, and some insulation, students can learn some interesting lessons about how heat loss occurs in homes. This article describes practical experiments that work well on units related to energy, sustainable energy, renewables, engineering, and construction.…

Thermoacoustic instability can appear in any thermal device when the unsteady heat transfer is favourably coupled with the fluctuations of acoustic pressure. In this paper, we present a project type of physical measuring and modelling task; the aim of our project is to help our students increase their knowledge of thermoacoustics. Our paper…

During the century from the publication of the work by Einstein (1905 "Ann. Phys." 17 549) Brownian motion has become an important paradigm in many fields of modern science. An essential impulse for the development of Brownian motion theory was given by the work of Langevin (1908 "C. R. Acad. Sci.", Paris 146 530), in which he proposed an…

Dependent variables in research on problem behavior typically are based on measures of response repetition, but these measures may be problematic when behavior poses high risk or when its occurrence terminates a session. We examined response latency as the index of behavior during assessment. In Experiment 1, we compared response rate and latency…