Psychology 330: Sensation and Perception

Fall 2009

 

Short paper #1: An opportunity to write about a perception experiment!

 

Due: Friday October 23rd by midnight (in the central time zone).

Submit your paper using the form on the following web page:

http://artsci.wustl.edu/~rabrams/classmail.htm

Please do not wait until the last minute to submit your paper.

 

 

Details about submitting the paper.  After you submit the form, check to be sure that you receive a copy of your paper via email.  This is your proof that you submitted the paper on time.  If you do not receive the copy then please submit your paper again because that means that it is possible that we did not receive it!  If you receive a low grade on your paper, you may attempt to improve it and resubmit it.  The highest score possible on a resubmission is 80% of the maximum for the assignment.  If you choose to resubmit your paper you must do so before midnight on Friday November 20th.    (Please do not submit an obviously deficient paper simply to beat the first deadline—such papers will not be accepted!)

 

The paper should be 600 words or less!  We will be counting the words—you should too.  (In Microsoft Word select the Review tab, then ‘Word count’, or in Word 2003 select ‘Tools’ and then ‘word count’.)

 

Assignment for the paper.  In the paper, you should concisely summarize the contents of a journal article that includes an experiment on some aspect of sensation/perception.  The paper should be written as if you are writing a newspaper article to appear in the science section of a newspaper like the New York Times.

 

To see some examples of this style of writing look here: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/science/index.html . 

 

There are also some good examples here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/mind_brain/perception/

 

The audience for your paper can be assumed to be educated and have a good vocabulary--but they can also be assumed to know nothing about psychology and maybe not too much about science in general.  Your job is to explain, in your own words without using jargon, one of the experiments in the journal article.  In the paper you must explain the rationale for the experiment (why the authors did what they did); what their methods were (what they did); and finally their results (what they found and what implications their findings have).  If the article contains multiple experiments you do not need to describe all of them.

 

Remember, you should not use jargon or any technically detailed descriptions.  Instead you should summarize the experiment in language that would be understood by someone without any special knowledge about science or psychology.  Remember also that in a short paper it will be difficult to describe all of the results, or to describe even a subset of the results with a great deal of detail.  Thus, you should think about the most important aspect(s) of the results and describe that.

 

Be sure to write the paper yourself, using your own words.  The wording used in a journal article, and in abstracts of journal articles, will generally be inappropriate for the newspaper-article-like paper that you will be writing.  You should first read the article and attempt to understand the experimental results.  Then explain the experiment to your target audience.

 

The article must have been published in 2009, and must come from one of the following journals:

 

Attention, Perception and Psychophysics

Perception and Psychophysics

Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
Cognition

Visual Cognition
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

Vision Research

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Psychological Science

Nature
Nature Neuroscience

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Science

 

Please pay attention to the publication date and journal requirements.  If you write your paper on an article from the wrong year or journal, then your paper will not be accepted.

 

If you search for articles using PsycINFO you will most likely be able to get a good article online.  Click “connect to database” on the following page:  http://library.wustl.edu/databases/about/psych.html

 

You may need to connect through a computer on campus in order to access the database.

 

NOTE:  If a paper is turned-in late, the maximum you can earn will be reduced by one-fifth of the value of the assignment for each day or portion of a day late. For example, if your paper is up to 24 hours late, the maximum you can earn is 4% of the final course grade instead of 5%.