COGSCI 100
Final Paper

Fall, 1998

The purpose of this final assignment is to offer you the opportunity to focus on a specific cognitive phenomenen you find interesting, learn something new about it by doing a little exploring in the primary cognitive science research literature, and integrate this new information with what you have learned in the course. Each of these aspects is discussed in turn below, as are the two stanges into which the assignment is divided.

Choosing the topic

What kind of phenomena is appropriate? Obviously, just about anything that came up in any of our readings or in class, and many others. Perhaps you wanted to know more about something we studied, or wondered how something we didn't look at would be handled. It will be helpful to be as specific as possible. The possibilities are endless, but two important criteria (besides your interest) are that you can find materials on it and that you can say something intelligent about how it fits into the field as you understand it from this course. Coming up with ideas may be facilitated by browsing in some cognitivie science journals in the library.

Finding the articles

There are explicitly multidisciplianry journals like Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Cognition, Mind and Language, ... as well as many journals in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and linguistics that contain relevant information. There are also a number of abstracting services available in the library and on the Web that can help you find material (ask the reference librarians for help if you aren't familiar with them). Don't forget to check the references cited in many of our readings.

You need to locate primary source material, meaning that the articles present original research findings rather than summarizing the research of others. These articles should not be purely theoretical - they must contain behavioral, neuroscientific, neuropsychological, and/or computational evidence. They should clearly apply to the specific phenomenon you have chosen to address, and of course you need to be able to understand them enough to use them for this assignment.

You normally will need two or three articles. If one or all your articles contain many experiments or subparts, however, you may select a subset to include.

The Structure of the Paper

Begin by identifying the phenomenon you have chosen. Spend a page or two locating this phenomenon in the field of cognitive science as you know it from our course. You might indicate what broader aspect of cognition it falls under, what piece of it your phenomenon has to do with, or what you already know about that piece. For instance, if your phenomenon was face recognition, you would present this as relevant to both vision and memory, and would discuss what Wet Mind suggest about how face recognition works.

Next, describe the additional information you have gained about the phenomenon from you articles. This is essentially a summary of the contents which should describe the basic thesis or hypothesis explored in the work, the methods used to test it, the empirical or computational evidence collected, and the logic of the arguments offered in support of the conclusions. It is crucial however, to do this in an appropriately selective and coherent way, i.e., you must boil each article (or the part of it you are using) down to the core of what's relevant for the purpose of this assignment. This section will probably require 6-7 pages.

Finally, the information gained from the two articles needs to be integrated with each other and with the background presented initially. Are the various pieces consistent with one another? Do specific findings conflict or is the entire approach different in some cases? It will be helpful here to compare the frameworks used by the articles with those used by Kosslyn & Koenig, functionalism, etc. Has the new information dramatically changed your understanding of the phenomenon, or of ways of studying it? What additional kinds of information or evidence would be useful for a more complete understanding?

The Proposal

Due: Friday, Nov. 20. Describe your topic in a paragraph or so, indicating which parts of our course are most relevant to it. Give full reference information for the articles you are planning to use, or a larger set from which you are planning to select the ones you will use. Please use the format found in the bibliography of Wet Mind.

Final Paper

Due: Friday, Dec. 11. For each of the articles you use, you must give the full reference information (using the format found in Wet Mind) at the end of your paper. Footnotes and quotations should not be necessary. The target length is 10 (numbered) pages. No extensions will be granted.

Consultation

You can consult me at any stage of your work on this assignment: choosing a phenomenon, finding articles, understanding the articles, writing the paper. You are expected to make an effort on your own first before seeking help, but I will be happy to provide help when and where needed. If you wish to change topics or source materials after completing your proposal, you need to see me.