A debate is emerging concerning the use of deception in social science research (especially when it employs experimental methods), driven primarily by the relatively recent move by many economists into experimental work. These economists generally argue that deception should be banned. Deception includes a variety of practices in social science…

This field experiment is designed to test for despotic behavior in Mallards ("Anas platyrhynchos"), and to examine how ducks distribute themselves relative to their resources. Students present Mallards with food patches differing in profitability in order to examine whether ducks distribute themselves ideal freely or ideal despotically. Students…

This article describes an experiment that measures the forces acting on a flying bird during takeoff. The experiment uses a minimum of equipment and only an elementary knowledge of kinematics and Newton's second law. The experiment involves first digitally videotaping a bird during takeoff, analyzing the video to determine the bird's position as a…

A camcorder can be a powerful tool in pedagogical settings, such as in an introductory physics course or in introducing undergraduates to data collection. In this paper, we discuss our experience using a Panasonic PV-GS150 digital camcorder to analyze the motion of a falling steel ball, with the goal of determining the acceleration due to gravity,…

"Born out of struggle and the struggle continues" is the motto of Chicago's Social Justice High School, one of four small, autonomous schools on one campus, Little Village Lawndale High School Campus (LVLHS). LVLHS was the result of a 19-day hunger strike in May 2001 by 14 community residents demanding that funds allocated for a new high…

Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that sound similar to a given word. Previous studies have found that neighborhood density influences the recognition of spoken words (Luce & Pisoni, 1998); however, this work has focused almost exclusively on monosyllabic words in English. To investigate the effects of neighborhood density on…

This research examines the development of children's understanding that people's judgments may be skewed by relationships, and that situational factors may make it difficult to be impartial. One hundred and seventy-one adults and children between kindergarten and eighth grade heard stories about judges in contests with objective or subjective…

Computer games such as Unreal Tournament (UT2004 and UT3) contain a "physics engine" responsible for producing believable dynamic interactions between players and objects in the three-dimensional (3D) virtual world of a game. Through a series of probing experiments we have evaluated the fidelity and internal consistency of the UT2004 physics…

Over the history of the study of visual perception there has been great success at discovering countless visual illusions. There has been less success in organizing the overwhelming variety of illusions into empirical generalizations (much less explaining them all via a unifying theory). Here, this article shows that it is possible to…

Two experiments investigated the mechanism by which listeners adjust their interpretation of accented speech that is similar to a regional dialect of American English. Only a subset of the vowels of English (the front vowels) were shifted during adaptation, which consisted of listening to a 20-min segment of the "Wizard of Oz." Compared…

Closed-class word selection was investigated by focusing on determiner production. Native speakers from three different languages named pictures of objects using determiner plus noun phrases (e.g., in French "la table" (the [subscript feminine] table), while ignoring distractor determiners printed on the pictures (e.g., "le"…

News reports of scientific research are rarely hedged; in other words, the reports do not contain caveats, limitations, or other indicators of scientific uncertainty. Some have suggested that hedging may influence news consumers' perceptions of scientists' and journalists' credibility (perceptions that may be related to support for scientific…

Why, during a decision between new alternatives, do people bias their evaluations of information to support a tentatively preferred option? The authors test the following 3 decision process goals as the potential drivers of such distortion of information: (a) to reduce the effort of evaluating new information, (b) to increase the separation…

We developed an alternative electrophilic aromatic substitution reaction for the organic chemistry teaching laboratory. The experiment is an electrophilic iodination reaction of salicylamide, a popular analgesic, using environmentally friendly reagents--sodium iodide and household bleach. Further, we designed the lab as a guided-inquiry…

This article presents data and theory concerning the fundamental question of how the brain achieves a balance between integrating and separating perceptual information over time. This theory was tested in the domain of word reading by examining brain responses to briefly presented words that were either new or immediate repetitions. Critically,…