Teaching and Advising

From demonstrations on perception to the history of psychology, online resources can help supplement your courses in introductory psychology. For use in planning your curriculum, topically organized Internet sites containing demonstrations and lists of additional resources are provided below.

Some demonstrations will require you to download other software players, such as those needed to play Shockwave, Flash or Mathematica.

General resource sites:

• Association for Psychological Science
  Visit the APS Teaching Resources site, maintained by John Krantz, or the APS Teaching Psychology site.
• American Psychological Association
  The Society of the Teaching of Psychology (Division 2) site provides information and support for educators of psychology.
• PsychScholar
  Maintained by John Krantz of Hanover College, this site provides a list of links to psychology tutorials.
• The Internet Psychology Lab
  Maintained by Leonard Trejo and Gary Bradshaw, this site offers demonstrations in cognition and visual and auditory perception. Most of the demonstrations are designed to be completed by individual students rather than as in-class demonstrations.
• ePsych
  From Mississippi State, this growing site provides demonstrations, most of which are designed to be completed by individual students rather than as in-class demonstrations.
• The Centre for Psychology Resource
  From Athabasca University, this is site is a mega-listing of psychology-related sites. Specific demonstrations and tutorials (http://psych.athabascau.ca/html/aupr/demos.shtml URL) are provided in the academic content sites column.
• Classroom Links for Interactive Psychology (CLIP)
  From Penn State, this site provides links to demonstrations and activities in many areas of psychology.
• The Encyclopedia of Psychology
  This site is primarily a listing of other Internet sites ranging from the history of psychology to behavior.
• Links for Introductory and Physiological Psychology
  Organized according to subject area, this extensive list is provided by Charles Long at the University of Memphis.
• The Exploratorium
  Part of the Museum of Science, Art, and Human Perception in San Francisco, the Exploratorium provides some psychology-related demonstrations (http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/f_exhibits.html URL). Psychology-related content areas include seeing, hearing, mind and life sciences.
• Psych Web
  Created by Russ Dewey at Georgia Southern, this site provides links to general psychology and career information.
• Learner.org
  Provided by the Annenberg Foundation, this site offers a streaming source for the Discovering Psychology video series. You need to register to get access.
• Psychology demonstrations, tutorials and other neat stuff is available through this site from Linda Walsh at the University of Northern Iowa.
• PsychLabOnline
  Provided by John Hay from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, this site helps students explore classic experiments. Shockwave is needed to use the site, and your students may need some guidance in navigating it.
• EPsychlopedia presents some tutorials and videos.
• The Presentations of Science Database is a collection of on-line presentations over various topics.
• Serendip provides brain and behavior demonstrations and links.

Experiment sites:

At the following sites, students can participate in online in experiments. However, these experiments do not count for the PSY 121 research requirement. You may wish to explore the experiments to determine their usefulness before assigning specific activities for students.

• The Internet Psychology Lab from the University of South Dakota provides mostly sensation and perception experiments and cognitive psychology experiments. To get to the experiments, click on the conduct an experiment link.
• The Online Psychology Laboratory from the American Psychological Association (APA) contains several interactive experiments and demonstrations. The level of explanation is very good, but may require a bit of searching.
• PsychExperiments: Psychology experiments on the Internet
  From the University of Mississippi, this site contains a wide variety of experiments designed both for classroom use and as research experiments.
• The Web Experimental Psychology Lab presents various psychology experiments on the web.

Research methods:

• Research Methods Tutorials
  Tutorials written by graduate students at Cornell. Site maintained by Bill Trochim.

Statistics links:

• The Teaching Statistics Resource Page from Division 5 of the American Psychological Association
• The resources page of the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education (CAUSE) provides several lessons, demonstration and projects involving statistics.
• Dr. Alan Reifman’s Intro Stat Page from Texas Tech University provides links to several sites that may be of interest to students and teachers of statistics.
• StatPages.org provides hundreds of links to web pages that provide statistical calculations.
• The Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics provides many java-based simulations and demonstrations of statistical concepts.
• The Statistics Workshops from Wadsworth offers tutorials of several statistical concepts.
• The VassarStats: Web Site for Statistical Computations offers guidance in completing statistical computations.
• Illuminations provides activities and lessons in statistics and other areas of math for preK to 12th grade math teachers. Many of the high school activities and lessons work for introductory statistics at the college level.

History links:

• Classics in the History of Psychology
  Maintained by York University, this site compiles a list of PDF copies of several classic works in psychology for your students to read.
• Links on the History of Psychology
  From the Social Psychology Network, this site provides links to general psychology history, definitions and psychologist biographies.
• History of Psychology Archives is a list of selected biographies of historical figures in psychology maintained by Muskingum College.
• History of Psychology
  From Rutgers University, this site is a collection of biographies of psychologists and the history of various aspects of psychology.
• Today in the History of Psychology allows the user to search the APA historical database by either the date or by keywords.

Physiology links:

• Neuroscience animations from John Krantz at Hanover College detail primarily sensory physiology.
• Basic Neural Processes from John Krantz at Hanover College provides a list of neuropsychology tutorials.
• Human Anatomy Online provides illustrated, interactive tutorials on various internal systems.
• Neuroscience for Kids from Eric Chudler provides several demonstrations that could be adapted for classroom use in introductory psychology.
• Dissecting a Sheep’s Brain is a presentation from the Exploratorium that provides step-by-step pictures and descriptions of the brain’s structure and processes.

Brain physiology

• The Whole Brain Atlas is a joint project by Keith A. Johnson (Harvard) and J. Alex Becker (MIT) that offers a great source of images of various brain structures and for practicing the identification of brain structures.
• This animated study module highlights the midsagittal structures of the brain (from the University of Alberta).
• This Neuroanatomy tutorial helps you identify different structures of the brain.
• The Human Brain Atlas
  From Michigan State University, this project presents MRI images of the brain.

Split brain demonstrations

• The Split-Brain Experiment game from Nobelprize.org is an animated demonstration of a person with a split brain being tested for his ability to report stimuli presented in the left and right visual field.
• The Split-Brain demonstration from John Chay helps the learner understand some basic functions of the two hemispheres.

Drugs and the brain

• Animations: How drugs work
  From PBS, this Moyers on Addiction site provides animated tutorials on the neurological impact of alcohol, cocaine and opiates.

Sensation and perception links:

• These sensation and perception tutorials are from John Krantz at Hanover College.
• These visual demonstrations by Stuart Anstis from UC-San Diego include several short demonstrations of a variety of visual illusions and related topics.
• The Perceptual Science Group at M.I.T. offers several nice demonstrations, many of which are located in the individual members’ web pages.
• “Living in a Reversed World” is a classic film in visual perception.

Illusions and related visual processing

• Sandlot Science presents a large number of illusions with some basic explanation and some interaction.
• Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s illusions site contains some very cool visual illusions but very little explanation.
• IllusionWorks is a comprehensive collection of demonstrations, examples and scientific explanations.
• 78 Optical Illusions and Visual Phenomena by Micheal Bach provides examples of optical illusions and other visual events with explanations of the phenomena.
• Project LITE from Boston University provides interactive examples of several visual phenomena related to color, light, motion, depth and form. Please note that some of the demonstrations work only in full screen and others include a rapid flashing light.
• See for Yourself
  Provided by Dale Purvis from Duke, this site includes interactive examples of visual phenomena in the areas of lightness/brightness, color, lines and angles, motion and music.
• Shapiro Lab
  Provided by Arthur Shapiro, this site includes interactive examples of various visual phenomena including lightness, motions and contrast.
• Collection of illusions
• Illusions from Wolfram Math World provides access to several illusions. You also can use Mathematica to download several interactive illusions, which allow you to manipulate different variables to see what affects the illusion.
• Donald Hoffman from the University of California-Irvine presents several visual illustrations and illusions.
• The How and Why of Optical Illusions, created by David Eustis, contains tutorials with explanation on various illusions.
• Grand Illusions is another site with several interesting illusions. The dragon video is recommended.
• Planet Website offers a motion illusion combining color after images with apparent motion.
• MagniPhi is a great site for the demonstration of the beta and phi phenomena—apparent motion and shape and apparent motion only.
• Mark Newbold’s Java Stuff site contains several interesting graphics images and demonstrations of the waterfall effect, an animated Necker cube, the Fechner color illusion and the Pulfrich illusion. This site may be best viewed in Firefox.
• Planet Perplex by Stephan Van den Bergh provides several fun visual illusions, hidden images and motion illusions. Please note that some of the illusions are not politically correct.
• The Illusions Gallery by David Landrigan at the University of Massachusetts provides several demonstrations of visual illusions and related concepts.
• The Colour Perception in Everyday Life Tutorial is provided by Rae Kokotailo and Donald Kline from Calgary University.

Change blindness:

• This change blindness demonstration from University of South Dakota presents the user with a set of change-blindness photos. The user can control different variables by right-clicking on a stimulus.
• Eye movements and scene perception is ePsych’s explanation of change blindness and visual integration.
• The Visual Cognition Lab has several videos demonstrating change blindness and inattentional blindness.
• This lecture on change blindness provides good discussion and examples of change blindness.

Motion perception and illusions:

• The bmlWalker from Bio Motion Labs demonstrates how the biological motion of people walking provides information regarding gender and mood.
• Motion Perception by George Mather from the University of Sussex provides several demonstrations of motion perception and related illusions.
• The Motion, Form, and Mid-Level Vision tutorial by Josh McDermott and Ted Adelson offers a set of tutorials and demonstrations regarding the interaction of form and motion.
• Motion-Induced Blindness from Yoram Bonneh, Alexander Cooperman, and Dov Sagi
• Motion Perception: A Web Tutorial by Fauzia Mosca and Nicola Bruno (University of Trieste) presents a discussion of how structure affects the perception of motion.

Auditory perception:

• Auditory.org lists several sources for purchasing demonstration CDs of auditory stimuli and illusions.
• The Ear page from Nobelprize.org presents a tutorial and quiz on the structure of the ear.
• Diana Deutsch from UC-San Diego presents a variety of musical demonstrations.
• Music-related sites from the Exploratorium including the Shepard Tones and Tritones Demonstration (http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/highest_note/ex.about.fr.html URL)

Developmental links:

Aging

• A quiz on aging by Linda Woolf at Webster University

Learning links:

Classical conditioning:

• John Chay provides a demonstration of how to classically condition a dog to salivate in response to light, sound, or both. No directions but can be used to demonstrate Kamin’s blocking study.
• The Pavlov’s Dog game from Nobelprize.org allows the user to try to train a dog to salivate.

Operant conditioning:

• Positive reinforcement tutorial from Athabasca University

Memory and cognition links:

Experiments:

• Cognition laboratory experiments from John Krantz at Hanover College provide various amounts of explanation depending on the experiment. If you want to have students do some of these, explore the experiments first before assigning.

Demonstrations and tutorials:

• The memory and cognition demonstrations and tutorials from Timothy Bender at Missouri State are designed to be used as classroom demonstrations. Some fit into a 50-minute class more easily than do others.
• Dual Task.org at UC-San Diego provides some attention and sensory memory demonstrations.
• The Cognition Lab from NASA contains demonstrations related to memory and cognition.
• Masked priming is a short demonstration and discussion of (you guessed it) masked priming.
• Mission: Critical is San Jose State University’s critical thinking site.
• Memory sites from the Exploratorium

Psychological disorders links:

This personality disorders exercise from John Suler provides practice at identifying various personality disorders. You need to print off paper handouts.

Therapy links:

• This Shades of Abnormality exercise from John Suler provides students with a chance to estimate the severity of a set of disorders. You need to print off paper handouts.
• This Transference Exercise from John Suler provides students with some practice at identifying transference.

Social psychology links:

• The teaching resources page from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology provides a list of demonstrations and assignments.
• The Teaching Social Psychology Activities and Exercises is a mega-list of demonstrations and exercises in social psychology.
• Social Psychology Network contains experiments, demonstrations and teaching resources for social psychology. Online social psychology studies (http://www.socialpsychology.org/expts.htm URL) are available, but the Social Psychology Network does not endorse the content or quality of the studies.
• Project Implicit is the home page for the Implicit Association Test from Harvard.
• Stanford Prison Experiment is the official site for information, testimonials and pictures of this notorious experiment conducted by Zimbardo.
• Understanding Prejudice educates about prejudice through surveys and various tests.
• The Social-Personality Psychology Questionnaire Instrument Compendium lists various questionnaires that you might use in research or in classroom discussions.

Industrial/organizational psychology links:

Bad Human Factors Designs presents bad designs in the workplace.

Publishers’ psychology site:

McGraw-Hill

Open source software and free software:

• PXLab is a collection of Java classes and applications for running psychological experiments. This is provided by Hans Irtel in Denmark.
• SurveyBuildR is open source software for creating surveys to run on the Internet.
• PsychLab allows the user to run classic experiments from cognitive psychology.