Animal-assisted Interventions (AAIs) have been used as therapeutic interventions aimed at improving psychological well-being, often for young people with mental health and educational difficulties. This qualitative study explored how three students (male and female), aged 12-15 and with ASD and/or ADHD diagnoses experienced AAI at an alternative…

Learning the physiology of the cardiovascular system can be difficult for students, but the use of active teaching methodologies can help and enhance learning. To facilitate the understanding of how the cardiovascular system works, we built a functional model for Veterinary Medicine students attending a cardiovascular physiology lecture and…

Most long-term memories are forgotten. What happens, then, to the changes in neuronal gene expression that were initially required to encode and maintain the memory? Here we show that the decay of recall for long-term sensitization memory in "Aplysia" is accompanied both by a form of savings memory (easier relearning) and by persistent…

Using the human-animal bond, relational ecology, and the "common world" framework as theoretical underpinnings, I set out to better understand the array of settings and experiences wherein young children are able to interact, either directly or indirectly with animals within the context of early childhood environmental education (ECEE).…

N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) at excitatory synapses are central to activity-dependent synaptic plasticity and learning and memory. NMDARs act as ionotropic and metabotropic receptors by elevating postsynaptic calcium concentrations and by direct intracellular protein signaling. In the forebrain, these properties are controlled largely…

Spatial navigation depends on the hippocampal function, but also requires bidirectional interactions between the hippocampus (HPC) and the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The cross-regional communication is typically regulated by critical nodes of a distributed brain network. The thalamic nucleus reuniens (RE) is reciprocally connected to both HPC and…

Episodic memories in early childhood are rapidly forgotten, a phenomenon that is associated with "infantile amnesia," the inability of adults to remember early-life experiences. We recently showed that early aversive contextual memory in infant rats, which is in fact rapidly forgotten, is actually not lost, as reminders presented later…

The growth of community gardens has created new opportunities for urban Extension personnel at a time when staffing resources continue to decline. To serve the integrated pest management (IPM) needs of community gardening populations, Extension educators in two urban counties developed an on-site program involving a demonstration kit and planning…

The teaching of quantitative genetic variation in the undergraduate laboratory practical environment can be difficult as, for quantitative phenotypes that are under the control of multiple loci, detection of phenotypic differences caused by individual variants is problematical without large samples, impractical in such classes. Pet dogs provide a…

Striving to better understand exemplification, this study examines the types of animal behavior references (anthropomorphic/non-anthropomorphic) and taxonomic groups featured in the examples given by an undergraduate biology instructor during a semester-long course. It is reported that instruction was dominated by anthropomorphic examples of…

The 4 experiments reported here used the preferential looking and habituation paradigms to examine whether 5-month-olds possess a perceptual template for snakes, sharks, and rodents. It was predicted that if infants possess such a template, then they would attend preferentially to schematic images of these nonhuman animal stimuli relative to…

We investigated children's (n = 120; 3- to 11-year-olds) and adults' (n = 18) reasoning about life-cycle changes in biological organisms by examining their endorsements of four different patterns of life- span changes. Participants were presented with two separate tasks: (a) judging possible adult versions of a juvenile animal and (b) judging…

Literature on effects of equine therapy in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has grown in recent times. Equine therapy is an alternative multimodal intervention that involves utilizing a horse to remediate core impairments in ASD. Recent systematic reviews in this area have several limitations including inclusion of populations other…

Inhibitory avoidance (IA) training in rodents initiates a molecular cascade within hippocampal neurons. This cascade contributes to the transition of short- to long-term memory (i.e., consolidation). Here, a differential equation-based model was developed to describe a positive feedback loop within this molecular cascade. The feedback loop begins…

This paper presents a new approach of learners grouping in collaborative learning systems. This grouping process is based on traces left by learners. The goal is the circular dynamic grouping to achieve collaborative projects. The proposed approach consists of two main algorithms: (1) the circular grouping algorithm and (2) the dynamic grouping…