# Animations for Teaching

Animations | License & Source Code | LabMedicine Paper

The following animations illustrate basic concepts in psychology and neuroscience. These animations require the Adobe Flash Player.

## Neuroscience

- Parts of a neuron
- Action potentials: How neurons send messages over long distances.
- Neurotransmission: This illustrates the process of communication between neurons.
- Comparison of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems: I thank Janie Wilson from Georgia Southern University for inspiring this animation.
- Neuroanatomy tour: This covers the gross anatomy of the brain as well as functions of each part.

## Sensation - Perception

- Threshold: This animation shows how an absolute threshold is determined. A fast, relatively new computer is needed or otherwise the timings may be off.
- Motion parallax as a depth perception cue.
- Benham's top is an illustration of subjective color from a black and white image. Note: This animation doesn't work properly on older computers because the "top" does not spin fast enough. If this doesn't spin fast enough, try making the browser window smaller to speed up the animation.
- Gestalt laws of form perception
- Iconic memory and visual masking: Once again, this one needs a fast computer to display the stimuli at the proper speeds.
- Additive color mixture tutorial: This one is not animated, but it is a tutorial!

## Lecture Animations

The following animations were designed to supplement lectures. They provide dynamic illustrations of particular phenomena, which will hopefully make teaching certain topics easier.

- Neurotransmission
- Action potentials
- Apparent motion
- Gestalt principles of form perception
- Short term memory demonstration

## Using and Licensing These Animations

The animations and source code are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. In short, you are allowed to use these animations and/or the source code in your courses and web pages, but an attribution must be made to Gary Fisk and this web site.

Download all of the above Flash animations in one .zip file.

Download the Flash source code (.zip format) for all of the above animations. These were created in an older version of Macromedia Flash, around about 2001 to 2004. Please note that I am no longer creating my own animations due to a lack of time. I cannot help you directly with your coding projects, but maybe these files will be useful to you in some way.

## Paper on Animations in Education

The following paper is an invited review of animations for the journal LabMedicine (from the American Society for Clinical Pathology). The uses of animations in crime scene investigations and as a teaching tool are covered. The educational part covers the advantages and disadvantages of using animations in educational settings.

Fisk, G.D. (2008). Using animation in forensic pathology and science education. LabMedicine, 39(10), 587-592.

Key findings:

- Animations are becoming increasingly useful in forensic medicine, especially for data visualization and the instruction of lay juries.
- Animations have a small but positive effect for the instruction of complex scientific topics
- Animations should not be regarded as an educational panacea for spicing up boring lectures
- Animations are only effective instructional tools when they are closely tied to the instructional objectives

Please note that this paper is not covered under the Creative Commons license. LabMedicine owns all copyright on this paper.

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