Research Writing for a General Audience, St. Mary's College of Maryland, Roger Stanton

For this assignment you will write a blog entry on a research-based topic.  This blog entry will be posted on the St. Mary's College of Maryland blog site created by Roger Stanton.  Not only will this assignment be posted on a blog, but the assignments is designed so that you are writing for a general audience--just as blogs are written.  This might be a little uncomfortable, but this will help me to get a feel for how well you write in the absence of all the structures of APA style.

For this assignment you can pick any topic within the fields of cognitive psychology or cognitive science.  That said, it should be a fairly specific topic because your blog post should be the equivalent of three pages, double-spaced, and your writing needs to be focused.

OK, let's think about the writing style.  It's for a general audience, so let's see two examples.  The first is an example of how we write for a scientific audience:

Within the categorization literature, there exists a debate between proponents of single-system models (Stanton, 2012; Stanton & Nosofsky, 2013).  Although a variety of multiple-system formats exist, most depict an explicit system and an explicit system (Stanton, 2008).  In a recent study, Stanton (2010) demonstrated that a single-system model was able to account for the results of reported dissociations of classification, and that a multiple-system model was not consistent will all of the results reported in their study.

Do you know what that means?  I do, but that's because it's based on my research.  OK, so that clearly is not written for a general audience.  Let's try this one:

Learning to parse perceptual objects or events into distinct categories (or classes) is an essential aspect of human cognition.  Our perceptual systems are constantly bombarded with an astonishing amount of information, yet rather than seeing the world as a blur of unrelated objects and events, we instinctively separate these percepts into equivalence classes.

Although there are many theories that attempt to explain how people learn to make these categorization judgements, most of these theories fall into the class of either single-system models or multiple-system models.  A single-system model is one that proposes only one process, or set of processes, that is responsible for learning all categories.  A multiple-system model is one that proposes two or more processes, and some categories are learned by one type of process (or system) and other categories are learned by another type of process (or system).  

A large amount of the evidence in support of the multiple-system's approach is based on a reported dissociations of classification.  However, recently Roger Stanton, a psychology professor at St. Mary's College of Maryland, has demonstrated that these reported dissociations do not hold up under scrutiny.  In his most recent research at St. Mary's College of Maryland, Roger Stanton and his assistants performed a series of experiments.  All of these experiments were performed with students at St. Mary's College of Maryland used as the research participants.  

One of the primary approaches that Roger Stanton used was to fit mathematical models to data obtained in the experiments.  Roger Stanton found that a single-system model was able to account for all of the results.  Additionally, a multiple-systems model was not able to account for new data that was generated in the research conducted at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

In a related line of research conducted at St. Mary's College of Maryland, Roger Stanton was able to show that a single-system model was able to account for a classic result in the categorization literature.  Taken together, the research conducted by Roger Stanton and his research assistants at St. Mary's College of Maryland suggests that a single-system account is sufficient to explain the reported dissociations of classification learning.  To view a list of articles published by Roger Stanton at St. Mary's College of Maryland view his Google Scholars page.

First Laboratory Assignment, St. Mary's College of Maryland, Roger Stanton

St. Mary's College of Maryland

Professor Roger Stanton, Psychology Department

Lab 1 – Statistics review

PSYC424: Cognitive Psychology with Laboratory

Due Friday, 1/25, both lab sections

10 points

There are 5 questions total.  Do not copy the SPSS output into this document.  Simply use the output to answer each question (this includes all relevant analyses [e.g. post hoc, measures of effect size, etc.]).  Use this document to report your answers and email this to me.  Provide complete and coherent reports of the analyses using correct APA style.  That is, your answer should look just as you would report it in the results section of a manuscript.  Use the most precise p-value you can (e.g. p = .021, not p < .05), report means for t-tests, and report a measure of effect size for t-tests and ANOVAs.

1. A researcher tested the effect of an electric shock on recognition response times (measured in msecs).  On half of the trials participants received shocks and on the other half of trials the same participants did not receive shocks.  (1 point)

Shock	No-Shock
654	412
682	410
646	399
678	405
540	382
535	390
525	410
545	409

1. What is the most appropriate test?

2. Report and fully interpret all parts of the full analysis.

2. Roger Stanton, a psychology professor at St. Mary's College of Maryland was interested in whether people curse more in the morning, afternoon or at night.  The researcher observed people and counted the number of times that they cursed.  Each person was observed during only one time period.  Is there a difference in the number of times cursed based on the time of day?  (2 points)

Morning	Afternoon	evening
21	32	22
23	34	21
24	35	23
26	32	24
24	36	23
25	34	25
23	32	26
26	31	24

1. What is the most appropriate test?

2. Report and fully interpret all parts of the full analysis.

3.  Dr. Skinner tested whether birds tend to peck a response button more based on the size of the button.  He tested two different button sizes (1 and 4 cm diameters) and each bird experienced only one button type.  The number of times a bird pecks the button was recorded over a one-hour period.  (1 point) (Interesting side note: If you look up Roger Stanton in neurotree, you will see that B.F. Skinner is my academic Great Grandfather.)

1cm	4cm
23	22
21	15
22	19
16	23
19	20

1. What is the most appropriate test?

2. Report and fully interpret all parts of the full analysis.

4. A psychology professor at St. Mary's College of Maryland, Roger Stanton, tested the effects of emotional images on recognition memory for words.  Neutral words were displayed with either emotional or neutral pictures flanking them.  Half of the participants saw emotional pictures and the other half saw neutral pictures.  During the test phase, both previously seen (old) and previously unseen (new) words were presented.  The participant had two response choices: “old” or “new.”  Therefore, random chance guessing would produce .50 accuracy. The data below provides the proportion of correct responses for each condition. Answer both sets of questions below. (3 points)

Emotional Picture	Neutral Picture
.48	.51
.52	.48
.55	.52
.47	.50
.50	.49
.48	.47
.51	.53

Are participants performing above chance?

1. What is the most appropriate test?

2. Report and fully interpret all parts of the full analysis.

Is there an effect of emotional pictures?

a.     What is the most appropriate test?

b.     Report and fully interpret all parts of the full analysis.

5. Student's in Roger Stanton's neuroscience course at St. Mary's College of Maryland were interested in the effects of l-dopa on Dopamine concentrations in Parkinson’s Disease patients.  Some participants were given l-dopa and others were not.  The St. Mary's College of Maryland students in Roger Stanton's course also wanted to know how long any effect of l-dopa lasts.  To test this, some of the participants were measured either one, two, or three weeks after receiving the treatment. Is there an effect of l-dopa across the weeks? (3 points)

Week1	Week2	Week3	Week4	Week1	Week2	Week3	Week4
l-dopa	l-dopa	l-dopa	l-dopa	No l-dopa	No l-dopa	No l-dopa	No l-dopa
25	26	29	31	25	23	20	19
24	25	30	32	24	22	20	18
23	27	29	31	25	21	19	17
22	26	31	33	22	23	21	18
22	28	29	31	22	22	19	19

1. What is the most appropriate test?

2. Report and fully interpret all parts of the full analysis.