In this article, we describe a fully computational laboratory exercise that results in an increase of students' understanding of what quantum chemical geometry optimization calculations are doing to find minimum energy structures. This laboratory exercise was conducted several times over multiple years at a small private undergraduate institution,…

This paper discusses the variety of ways in which The Bakken Museum has made use of replicas or simulations of historical instruments and experiments and demonstrations in education programs and exhibits for school children, families with children, and other museum audiences. Early efforts were stimulated in the mid-1980s by a collaboration with…

After C. L. Folk, R. W. Remington, and J. C. Johnston (1992) proposed their contingent-orienting hypothesis, there has been an ongoing debate over whether purely stimulus-driven attentional capture can occur for visual events that are salient by virtue of a distinctive static property (as opposed to a dynamic property such as abrupt onset). The…

Research has documented two effects of interfeature causal knowledge on classification. A "causal status effect" occurs when features that are causes are more important to category membership than their effects. A "coherence effect" occurs when combinations of features that are consistent with causal laws provide additional…

The current research article is based on a simple and practical way of employing the computational power of widely available, versatile software MS Excel 2007 to perform interactive computer simulations for undergraduate/graduate students in biology, biochemistry, biophysics, microbiology, medicine in college and university classroom setting. To…

The authors examined patterns of facilitation under forward-masked priming conditions across 3 list contexts (Experiments 1-3) that varied with respect to properties of filler trials--(a) mixed (morphological, orthographic, semantic), (b) identity, and (c) semantic--but held the relatedness proportion constant (75%). Facilitation for targets that…

Computer-based interviewing systems could use models of respondent disfluency behaviors to predict a need for clarification of terms in survey questions. This study compares simulated speech interfaces that use two such models--a generic model and a stereotyped model that distinguishes between the speech of younger and older speakers--to several…