Dr. Diane Baxter
Stepping into the Light: Thoughts on Performance Anxiety
This presentation will focus on how we can do our best under duress.

Dr. Annie Ittner
Learning How to Read in Another Language
How can the arts and sciences help make sense of learning to read in another language? The school communities in our country are increasingly multilingual. Multilingualism is an asset to the learning environments in classrooms. Neuroscience tells us that the bilingual brain has greater cognitive flexibility. Understanding this cognitive flexibility can help teachers develop a classroom environment where students learning how to read can capitalize on their strengths. One way teachers support this is through exploring the arts of literature, writing, and storytelling.

Dr. Gay Timken
Play – art, science or…?
“In our play we reveal what kind of people we are.” Ovid, Roman poet (427-347 BC)What is play? Why do we play? Is play art or science, or neither? How does play change with age, and should it? “We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing” Ben Franklin

Dr. Dan McCarthy
What illusions can tell us about perception
If there is one thing that can be learned from the study of visual perception, it is that we do not see the world as it is, but rather construct our reality based available cues in the environment. Seeing the world appears so effortless that we often take for granted how complicated vision actually is. In certain cases, we misperceive the world, and sometimes we perceive things that do not physically exist outside our minds. Such visual illusions that ‘break the brain’ can provide very informative insight into the underlying neural mechanisms that give rise to our visual experience. Here, I will show several compelling examples of visual illusions and discuss how we can learn about the brain from instances in which it fails to arrive at the ‘right’ answer.

Dr. Leanne Merrill
It’s Turtles All the Way Down: Self-Similarity in Mathematics, Music, and Life
Self-similarity originated as a mathematical term, but it describes an idea that pervades many scientific and artistic realms. Mathematical fractals, musical frequencies, and recursive computer algorithms all exhibit self-similarity in various forms. What can we learn from the study of self-similarity across disciplines? This talk seeks to explore connections across disciplines through the lens of self-similar structures.