Mechanical systems have structural organizations--parts, and their relations--and functional organizations--temporal, dynamic, and causal processes--which can be explained using text or diagrams. Two experiments illustrate the role of arrows in diagrams of mechanical systems. In Experiment 1, people described diagrams with or without arrows,…

The authors present a classroom public goods experiment on the basis of a provision-point mechanism (PPM), where subjects must make an all or nothing decision about providing the public good. As a teaching tool, this design is superior to traditional prisoner's dilemma games because it creates multiple equilibrium in which individual financial…

A simple framework for evaluating experimental kinetic data to provide support for Specific Acid Catalysis (SAC) and General Acid Catalysis (GAC) is described based on the factors affecting their relative efficiency. Observations reveal that increasing the SAC-to-GAC rate constant ratio reduces the effective pH range for GAC.

An experiment illustrating stereochemical principles, like different physical properties in achiral environments, assignment of absolute stereochemistry, and the stereoisomeric relationships to differences in absolute stereochemistry is devised. A demonstration of how enantiomers have the same physical properties until placed in chiral…

Organometallic complex synthesis in advanced inorganic or organic courses usually begin with the synthesis of ferrocene. A synthetic experiment of an alternative compound that has a more interesting structure and the same air stability that makes ferrocene desirable is presented.

Application of conductivity tools in nonaqueous solvents is described with the help of experiments, which display specific characteristics of the SN1 mechanism. Changes in the most essential variables of the SN1 mechanism demonstrate the impact on the solvolysis rates.

The unique occurrence of the upward motion of a thin film of wine, and its formation into drops inside the wall of a wine glass is explained. Evaporation of alcohol generates a surface tension gradient, moving the film of wine upwards on the internal sides of a wine glass, where it collects and forms into drops or tears.

The sequence of microscale mixing of 1-bromo-3-chloro-5-iodobenzene along with reductive deamination of 4-bromo-2-chloro-6-iodoaniline is described. This novel deamination approach is beneficial in final product separation and higher product output.

Exfoliated-compressed graphite materials are examined. A chemical explanation for the pseudo-exfoliation phenomenon is proposed.

The production of a GPC-based material by submitting a cross-linked resin precursor to control thermal conditions is discussed. The precursor material is prepolymerized at 60-degree Celsius in a mold and is carbonized in inert atmosphere by slowly raising the temperature, the rise is performed to avoid change in the shape of the carbonization…

This paper investigates the paradigmatic relations between inflected word forms (or their affixes) and the feature specifications of these elements. In two sentence-matching experiments German speakers had to decide whether sentence pairs involving inflected adjectives or determiners were identical or not. In both experiments, there was a delay…

Recent work from an embodied-cognition perspective suggests that symbolic understanding involves bodily actions. Indeed, laboratory evidence and cultural phenomena such as magic rituals and symbolic aggression show that the behaviors evoked by a word and its referent can be quite similar to each other. In other circumstances, however, words and…

An experiment is reported in which the effect of unconditioned stimulus (US) intensity on latent inhibition (LI) was examined, using a two-stage conditioned emotional response (CER) procedure in rats. A tone was used as the pre-exposed and conditioned stimulus (CS), and a foot-shock of either a low (0.3 mA) or high (0.7 mA) intensity was used as…

Prior research suggests that infants attend to a variable in an event category when they have identified it as relevant for predicting outcomes in the category, and that the age at which infants identify a variable depends largely on the age at which they are exposed to appropriate observations. Thus, depending on age of exposure, infants may…

Neural integration of glutamate- and dopamine-coded signals within the nucleus accumbens (NAc) is a fundamental process governing cellular plasticity underlying reward-related learning. Intra-NAc core blockade of NMDA or D1 receptors in rats impairs instrumental learning (lever-pressing for sugar pellets), but it is not known during which phase of…