This assignment involves choosing a known illusion of the senses, demonstrating this illusion to friends and/or family, researching the underlying mechanisms and theories on the cause of the illusion, and writing a summary of the research and your personal findings. This paper allows you to demonstrate your writing ability, as well as your ability to read and summarize research.
The instructions are below. You should be familiar with them already after having completed the Illusion Paper – Topic Submission and have hopefully already completed several of the steps below. If you have any questions, please email me or post in the General Q&A forum.
ILLUSION PAPER INSTRUCTIONS
STEP 1:
Choose an illusion.
Here is the list of approved illusions with the research article assigned to each illusion: Illusion Options
When choosing an illusion, please keep in mind social distancing! This assignment requires that you show the illusion to three other people. You may want to choose an illusion that you can send to family or friends with a link, rather than an illusion that requires you be physically near them.
STEP 2:
Find references that include the following:
Reference 1 (optional, depending on illusion) ＝ video/audio link or file that you used to demonstrate or perform this illusion on other people
Reference 2 (sometimes the same as Reference 1 or 3) ＝ desсrіption/background of illusion (sometimes, this is from the research article; other times, it′s a website, online news article, or video)
Reference 3 ＝ research article assigned based on which illusion you chose (found on the Illusion Options page under the illusion)
STEP 3:
Setup a simple experiment to show the illusion to three other people.
You will need to:
Develop the methods and how you will obtain data about their perception.
This should be a very simple setup. We will not be running any type of statistics on this.
Describe their perception and their reaction.
Ask them if they have a theory as to why the illusion occurs.
More information on this section can be found in the document under the ″CONTENT″ section below.
Step 4:
Write the essay.
CONTENT
Please open or print this document for the specific instructions for each section of the paper:
Illusion Paper InstructionsDownload Illusion Paper Instructions
FORMATTING
Please use this template: Illusion Paper TemplateDownload Illusion Paper Template
7-10 pages in length, Times New Roman font (size 12), double-spaced, one-inch margins.
The only parts that need to follow APA style formatting are quotations, in-text citations, and the reference page.
To review these, I suggest starting here:
In-text CitationsLinks to an external site.
Reference PageLinks to an external site.
Points will be deducted if the formatting is not followed correctly. For example, if you use the entire title of an article as your in-text citation in the paper (rather than the authors and year), you will lose points.
Along with the article that you find, you will also need to provide a reference for any supplementary information you include in your paper, as well as the reference for the video or sound file that you used to demonstrate the illusion to other people.
GRAMMAR, SPELLING, & WRITING STYLE
Please note that grammar, writing style, and structure account for ~10% of the points for this paper (see the rubric below). If this is an area that you struggle with, I recommend reaching out to the UNLV Writing Center (you get extra credit if you do) or contacting me to review your paper prior to submitting the final draft.
