Psychology 330: Sensation and Perception
Fall 2008
Short paper #1: An opportunity to write about a perception
experiment!
Due:
Friday October 24th 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
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 21st. (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 ‘Tools’, 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
2008, and must come from one of the following journals:
Perception and Psychophysics
Journal of Experimental Psychology
Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General
Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Human Perception and Performance
Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, & Cognition
Vision Research
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Psychological Science
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
Nature
Nature Neuroscience
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Science
Cognition
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.
To do that:
·
go
here http://library.wustl.edu
·
select the “databases”tab
in the Search Resources box.
·
Enter
Psycinfo as the name of the database