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 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.

Research methods:

Statistics links:

History links:

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:

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:

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

Learning links:

Classical conditioning:

Operant conditioning:

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:

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.