Acknowledgements

This was a large undertaking in a very short period of time. We would like to acknowledge that we see this as an ongoing project, and while we’re very proud of what we have accomplished to date, we will be continuing to edit, update, and improve based on the needs of our students and program.

We would first like to thank Dalhousie’s Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT) and Dal Libraries for awarding us the first-ever Open Educational Resources (OER) grant. This small grant allowed us to hire two (fantastic) students to help us get this project off the ground. Also, thanks to Geoff Brown of Dal Libraries, who helped us in the initial stages of setting up the Pressbooks site and working out many of the hiccups we encountered.

We’d also like to acknowledge and thank (profusely), the two undergraduate students, Alex Oprea and Mallory Whebby, who were integral to moving this project forward. Both students helped us to review existing material, rework and edit content to better align with our program, highlight potential issues, embed Tricky Topics, and much more. This book would not be possible without their contributions.

Thank you to Swasti Arora, a former BA in Psychology student, was also hired through the OER grant and helped increase the accessibility of the book by adding and editing the alternative text for all the figures, and replacing figures with some of our custom images (higher-resolution and high-contrast colours).

A big thanks goes out to Qendresa Sahiti, a recent graduate of the BSc (Honours) in Neuroscience and Dylan Deska-Gauthier (x-illustrations.ca), a PhD student in Medical Neurosciences at Dalhousie, who were both integral in helping us to recreate and redesign many of our Tricky Topics to ensure they met OER criteria. This allowed us to embed our Tricky Topic videos into the textbook and will allow them to be shared with all students, freely.

We’d like to highlight the amazing custom cover designed by the talented Molly Wells (http://www.mollywellsart.ca/scientific-illustration.html). You’ll notice many of Molly’s custom images throughout the book (mainly concentrated in the Biological Basis of Behaviour and Sensation & Perception) and in several of our Tricky Topics. Molly’s images have been designed with accessibility in mind, ensuring high-contrast borders and distinguishable colours.

Finally, we would like to respectfully acknowledge and thank all of the people who donated themselves – their brains, bodies, and behaviours – to science. Without these individuals, we would not have such a deep and rich understanding of psychology and neuroscience. We owe much of what is known and written about on the following pages to these individuals who have given such an amazing gift. This gratitude also extends to the non-human animals to whom we owe an immeasurable debt. We ask that you reflect on these sacrifices and gifts as you read and learn about cellular function, anatomical structures, neuropathology, treatments, development, personality, learning, and everything else from neurons to behaviour.