Observation of human actions influences the observer's own motor system, termed visuomotor priming, and is believed to be caused by automatic activation of mirror neurons. Evidence suggests that priming effects are larger for biological (human) as opposed to non-biological (object) stimuli and enhanced when viewing stimuli in mirror compared to…

Color is a complex and rich perceptual phenomenon that relates physical properties of light to certain perceptual qualia associated with vision. Hering's opponent color theory, widely regarded as capturing the most fundamental aspects of color phenomenology, suggests that certain unique hues are mutually exclusive as components of a single color.…

A challenging topic in undergraduate physiology courses is the complex interaction between the vertebrate endocrine system and the immune system. There are relatively few established and accessible laboratory exercises available to instructors to help their students gain a working understanding of these interactions. The present laboratory module…

Undergraduate biology education provides students with a number of learning challenges. Subject areas that are particularly difficult to understand include protein conformational change and stability, diffusion and random molecular motion, and molecular crowding. In this study, we examined the relative effectiveness of three-dimensional…

Using course materials to promote visual literacy skills is an important aspect of undergraduate science education. A comparison study was undertaken to determine the composition of visual representations, specifically representations of data generated from experimental research, found in general biology and discipline-specific textbooks compared…

A single heartbeat is a complicated process. In Dutch upper secondary biology textbooks this process is illustrated by the classical Wiggers diagram, which usually shows different heart-related quantities, like voltage (ECG), blood pressure, and the heart sounds. It may help students to understand the nature of the Wiggers diagram if they perform…