TJR Middle School Visits

On April 6th and 8th the class visited Mrs. Kahn's seventh-grade life sciences class. Here we shared what we'd learned through short presentations, handouts created by the students, and interactive demonstrations with the seventh-graders. Below is a decription of what we did and several pictures from the demonstrations.

The Monday Visit:

• Julie Terry began with a short introduction about why we study perception and talked about / showed some visual illusions.
• Toni Ray then talked about the basic structure of the eye and explained the blind spot demonstration.
• Joseph Heggins then briefly discussed the perceptual worlds of infants and animals. We passed around pictures which illustrate how infants see when they are newborns, 1 month old, 2 months etc. until 6months, at which point their vision is nearly as good as an adults. We also brought a couple rat brains and some MRIs and CAT scans of human brains.
• Nichol Cook discussed some clinical aspects of vision: myopia, macular degeneration, glaucoma, and cataracts.

After these presentations, we divided into groups so that each SFA student worked with about two TJR students. We had several sets of goggles which simulated the effects of low acuity, glaucoma, cataracts, macular degeneration, and retinitous pigmentosa. Each TJR student took turns wearing the different goggles while performing an everyday task such as reading the bulletin board, walking down the hall, and getting a drink of water. They were all amazed how everyday activities become much more difficult when there is some loss of vision!

Mandy Taylor watches two TJR students wearing goggles. The girl on the stairs has on a pair which simulate the reduced perceptual field of glacoma.

The Wednesday Visit:

• John Angell and Shannon Crouch started out with short discussions on color vision. John talked about the trichromatic and opponent-processes of vision and Shannon discussed color blindness.

At this point, we had the SFA and TJR students pair up again and do several color demonstrations at the desks: color after-effects, Ishihara color plates to test for color blindness, colored-yarn matching with and without a yellow lens in front of their eyes (which simulated the yellowing of the variable lens seen in the aging human eye), and viewing pictures which simulate visual sceens as perceived by people with different types of colorblindness.

Toni Ray works with a student who is matching colored yarn while looking through a yellow transparency. Julie Terry is using the Ishihara color plates to test a students' color vision.

• Erik Steen then gave a short discussion of depth perception and motion percpetion.
• Glenda Demaree presented information about the senses of touch, taste, and smell and how experience along with the latter two affect our food preferences.
• Mandy Taylor discussed the sense of hearing regarding both the basic structure of the auditory system and aspects of hearing loss.

After these presentations we first played a tape which simulated the effects of different levels of high frequency hearing loss. We stressed that life-long exposure to sound, especially loud sounds (like through walkman headphones) could lead to such losses in older age.

Finally, we again had the students experience interactive demonstrations in groups. There was a motion after-effect spiral, stereoscopes which had figural and random-dot stereograms, a book with red-green stereograms and other illusions, the Pulfrich effect, goggles which inverted and displaced vision, and an active touch demonstration that was done both with and without gloves (to simulate loss of agility and touch receptors often seen with aging).

Erik Steen shows a group of TJR students the motion aftereffect demonstration.

A TJR student experiences the world upsidedown by wearing inverting prism goggles.

Glenda Demaree works with a student who is wearing a glove to stimulate aging and who is trying to recognize objects by only using the sense of touch.